Evaluating the equity of location and availability of healthcare infrastructure as a function of accessibility

The accessibility of healthcare facilities is an essential indicator for evaluating the welfare of a territory’s population. Living close to a hospital or reaching it easily reduces indirect costs (travel, the need to stay away from home, etc.) for patients and their families; poor accessibility, on the other hand, produces high indirect costs, sometimes limiting the possibility of receiving care. A problem of equity may emerge, considering that some segments of the population may have good accessibility of health facilities and others may not have the same levels of accessibility. When considering how and where to invest resources in building new health facilities or expanding and improving existing ones, assessing equity is important, given that the resources come from public funds. In this paper, we propose a model to evaluate the equity of the location of healthcare facilities. By applying the proposed methodology to a real case, the Campania Region, we calculate a Gini index of 0.2208, which is deemed acceptable but can be improved.