Accessibility to health services at the Guápiles Health Area Headquarters, Costa Rica

Abstract

The space gap over total health care coverage remains far from ideal thresholds for accessibility and availability. This is related to the inequity space of health care services that it persists in avoidable, unnecessary, and unjustifiable inequality. The objective of this article is to identify the spatial accessibility of the population. This would be the eight health sectors to the new Guápiles Health Area Headquarters (GHAH) of Costa Rica in 2020 which starts from the analysis of the geographic data divided into time and distance; respectively of the headquarters, and the influence of the growth of the urban network based on the investigation area. The results demonstrate that only four out of the eight studied sectors present an average more than 60% of their population within the ideal accessibility coverage according to the proposed indicators, while the urban expansion has a raised possibility to maintain or even grow in the studied area. To conclude, it is essential to mention that given geographic criteria as they were analyzed in this article; provide opportunities and tools to organize the Health Cares in Costa Rica; specifically, make tough decisions to the reality, equity, and socio-spatial dynamics of the Health Care Areas.