Travis Tormala

The proper accessibility to physicians is important for the health of Canadians. The ability to measure a population’s access to physicians can find underserviced areas that are in need of better access to physicians. This paper uses an integrated approach for measuring access to family physicians within the Sudbury Census Metropolitan Area (CMA). Both the spatial and aspatial access of the population is examined. The aspatial analysis is completed using three groups that encompass populations at risk for physician access; socio-economic status, demographics, linguistic and cultural. The spatial access was determined using two measures; the two-step floating catchment area (2sfca) measure and the enhanced twostep floating catchment area (e2sfca) measure. The e2sfca improves the original 2sfca method by including distance decay, thus giving more appropriate results estimate of spatial access.
The results showed the majority of at-risk aspatial values fell within the city of Sudbury, and the majority of at-risk spatial values fell outside of the city of Sudbury. However, there were a few areas with both lower aspatial and spatial values. The results led to the conclusion that the best location for new family physicians would be in smaller towns outside of the city of Sudbury. This would help increase the low spatial scores outside the city of Sudbury, as well as help the a few areas that are both spatial and socioeconomically disadvantaged.