Assessing emergency healthcare accessibility in the Salton Sea region of Imperial County, California.

ABSTRACT: The area surrounding California's Salton Sea, which lies within Riverside and Imperial counties, has particularly negative health outcomes. Imperial County, a primarily rural region that encompasses the lake, has pediatric asthma-related emergency healthcare visits that double the state average. This paper seeks to assess the level of emergency healthcare access in the Salton Sea region of Imperial County, drawing from spatial science methods. For this study, the "Salton Sea region" is defined as all Imperial County census tracts that include the Salton Sea within its boundaries. To measure "access," this study calculated driving travel times from census tracts to hospitals within Imperial County rather than Euclidean distance to account for geography and urban infrastructures such as road

SUBMITTER: Juturu P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8244845 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature