Spatial Accessibility to cervical-cancer prevention and control services in San Luis Potosi. A proposal from the Geography of Health.

Abstract

BACKGROUND. Accessibility to health care is a key objective, internationally speaking, to the satisfaction of population health needs. Equity and quality in access to health services (WHO, 2014). Borgonovi and Compagni (2013:34) argue that "medical care should be accessible and equitable for the entire population, based on sustainable attention economically, socially and politically speaking". Recent studies that incorporate the spatial analysis show that the Cervical Cancer (CC) is a disease which evolution provides a very valuable period of time for its prevention, for that its well-timed care depends a lot on the accessibility to medical services and the spatial distribution of related socioeconomic factors (Mc Grail And Lorenzo-Luaces, 2009; Cheng et al., 2011; Teran-Hernandez et al., 2016a). The CC is the fourth most common cancer in women and the seventh overall in the world, affecting 528,000 individuals each year worldwide, with an age-standardised incidence rate (ASR) of 14.0 per 100,000 women. CC is reflected in different geographic distributions. It is a significant public health problem, especially in low and middle-income/Gross Domestic Product (GDP) countries. In Mexico, CC affects 13,960 women 15 years old or older (ASR 23.3, incidence Ignacio Morones Prieto or Hospital del Nino y la Mujer (in certified process), which are located in the metropolitan area of SLP city and ranks 5th and 6th according to the index of accessibility calculated in our study. For most of the women inhabiting the inner SLP states, far removed from the state capital, this hospital is not a viable option for early detection and treatment, before the illness evolves to advanced stages. Therefore, the medical units are unable to meet the demand generated in their respective areas of influence, for instance, in the southeast. CONCLUSIONS. The results of the method show the spatial variation in access to these services. It is proposed to incorporate the spatial accessibility as an indicator of the territorial dimension in health that allows differentiating disadvantaged areas, in order to spatially reorganize services, and as a result, this disparity which must be corrected by the planners in the health sector might be solved. In addition, when comparing the level of access inequality between the different levels of territorial aggregation there are very evident contrasts by what the aggregation of information could hide very different realities as our data denote, hence you should consider the spatial dimension in the planning of services and not only regulatory aspects of staffing.