Incorporating Exercise Efficiency to Evaluate the Accessibility and Capacity of Medical Resources in Tibet, China

Accessibility and capacity of medical resources are key for the health care and emergency response, while the efficiency of the medical resources is very much limited by hypoxia in Tibet, China. Through introducing exercise efficiency, this study explores the accessibility of township residence to county-ship medical resources in Tibet using weighted mean travel time (WMT), and evaluates the medical capacity accordingly. The results show that: 1) the average travel time of township residence to county-level hospital is around 2 h by motor vehicle in Tibet. More than half of the population can not reach the county-ship hospital within 1 h, 33.24% of the population can not reach within 2 h, and 3.75% of the population can not reach within 6 h. 2) When considering the catchment of the medical resources and the population size, the WMT of the county-ship medical resources ranges from 0.25 h to 10.92 h. 3) After adjusted by travel time and exercise efficiency, the county-ship medical capacity became more unequal, with 38 out of 74 counties could not meet the national guideline of 1.8 medical beds per 1000. 4) In total, there are 17 counties with good WMT and sufficient medical resources, while 13 counties having very high WMT and low capacity of medical resources in Tibet. In the end, suggestions on medical resources relocation and to improve the capacity are provided. This study provides a method to incorporate exercise efficiency to access the accessibility and evaluate medical capacity that can be applied in high altitude ranges.

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at 10.1007/s11769-022-1321-1.