Revealing spatiotemporal inequalities, hotspots, and determinants in healthcare resource distribution: insights from hospital beds panel data in 2308 Chinese counties.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Ensuring universal health coverage and equitable access to health services requires a comprehensive understanding of spatiotemporal heterogeneity in healthcare resources, especially in small areas. The absence of a structured spatiotemporal evaluation framework in existing studies inspired us to propose a conceptual framework encompassing three perspectives: spatiotemporal inequalities, hotspots, and determinants.

Methods

To demonstrate our three-perspective conceptual framework, we employed three state-of-the-art methods and analyzed 10 years' worth of Chinese county-level hospital bed data. First, we depicted spatial inequalities of hospital beds within provinces and their temporal inequalities through the spatial Gini coefficient. Next, we identified different

SUBMITTER: Song C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11218403 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature