Advancing the frontiers of geographic accessibility to healthcare services

Abstract

Assessing geographic accessibility to healthcare is essential to identify communities that have been left behind. Smartphone mobility data now enables the study of healthcare accessibility over a global scale, providing estimates of actual travel times to access care. Macharia et al. discuss a Communications Medicine article on global healthcare accessibility and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. They outline strengths in the comprehensive approach taken to studying revealed versus potential spatial accessibility, plus some limitations and wider context with which the results can be interpreted.