A brief report on Primary Care Service Area catchment geographies in New South Wales Australia.

ABSTRACT:

Background

To develop a method to use survey data to establish catchment areas of primary care or Primary Care Service Areas. Primary Care Service Areas are small areas, the majority of patients resident in which obtain their primary care services from within the geography.

Methods

The data are from a large health survey (n =267,153, year 2006-2009) linked to General Practitioner service use data (year 2002-2010) from New South Wales, Australia. Our methods broadly follow those used previously by researchers in the United States of America and Switzerland, with significant modifications to improve robustness. This algorithm allocates post code areas to Primary Care Service Areas that receive the plurality of patient visits from the post code area.

Results

Consistent w

SUBMITTER: Mazumdar S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4197238 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature