Assess to health services and care is not equally distributed around the world. 

Access to health services continues to be major problem around the world. 

• A woman dies every 2 minutes from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.

• 400 million people still lack basic health care

• 1.6 billion people live in fragile settings with poor access to health services

Accessibility to health services is multidimensional with physical accessibility playing an important role in addressing inequalities in health services. 

We use geographic information and geospatial technologies to address the inequalities in accessibility to health services.

MASS VACCINATIONS: In 2020 the COVID-19 Pandemic shutdown the world with lockdowns implemented of different levels of severity and for different durations. Making vaccinations accessible was vital for ensuring mass vaccination campaigns were successful in reaching populations and ensuring countries could return to normal and travel across borders could resume.  To achieve this identifying where vaccination centers were located was vital along with modeling accessibility using local transportation modes.  To accomplish this we

• examined accessibility by bicycle, a common mode of transportation in the Netherlands, 

• examined how access will change as centers closed, and 

• explored the spatial distribution of vaccination centers using different vaccination strategies (50%,  70%, 85%)

See Al-Huraibi et al 2023, 2025 for details.

SEASONAL CHANGES IN ACCESSIBILITY:  The prevalence of diseases such as measles, malaria, and cholera can change with seasons. The drivers of these can be due to climate and or seasonal social events. For example, measles can rise during the dry season in particular areas or with the holiday season in others and access to medical facilities can be hindered due to extreme weather and conflict. Ensuring vaccines are available and accessible at different times of the year are important. We use different spatial modeling methods to examine accessibility and how accessibility to health facilities may change due to extreme weather events and with different modes of transportation. Examples of how we accomplish this include

• comparative analyses of how accessibility using different modes of transportation change between the dry and wet season,

• determine what percentage of the population is affected with seasonal changes,

• determine who has access to what services and where the inequalities occur.  

see Blanford et al., 2012, Blanford 2024.

Sources

Book - Chapter 8. Accessibility Methods: Spatial accessibility to health services and essential healthcare in Blanford (2024) Geographic information, geospatial technologies and spatial data science for health. Pp376. CRC Taylor & Francis.

Book - Chapter 9. Geographic Information for Planetary Health action in Blanford (2024) Geographic information, geospatial technologies and spatial data science for health. Pp376. CRC Taylor & Francis.

• 2025 Al-Huraibi, A., Amer, S., Blanford, J.I. (2025) Efficient allocation of vaccination centers to maximize coverage using common modes of transportation such as the bicycle. Geospatial Health

• 2023 Al-Huraibi, A., Amer, S., Blanford, J.I. (2023) Cycling to get my vaccination: how accessible are COVID-19 vaccination centers in the Netherlands? AGILE: GIScience Series, 4, 16, 2023. https://doi.org/10.5194/agile-giss-4-16-2023.

• 2012 Blanford, J.I., Kumar, S., Luo, W. and MacEachren, A.M. (2012) It’s a long, long walk: accessibility to hospitals, maternity and integrated health centers in Niger. International Journal of Health Geographics. 11:24