The Accessibility And Equalization Research Of Rural Public Medical Services

Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee, the urbanization level of China have improved continuously and got a notable achievement about economic and social. Because of the dual economic pattern persists, there is still a big gap between rural and urban area. Especially in basic public services, like health services, public education and cultural, the gap becomes more apparent. In the field of health care, the country’s health expenditure to GDP is much smaller than the average of world, and the remote rural areas are suffering from a shortage of medical resources. Because of this unequal status between urban and rural area on the service of medical, and the low efficiency of resource allocation on medical resources, it becomes very necessary to achieve the equalization of basic medical services. The paper takes the country of Honghu in Hubei province as the research area and chooses the public health service accessibility and equalization status as the main research line, which is based on spatial and non-spatial perspective. Using the method of ArcGIS and quantitative analysis, to find the status of public service accessibility and equalization. And then explore its equalization path, give the appropriate policy recommendations and solutions.The paper have mainly completed the follow studies:firstly, vectorized the dates which have been collected by ArcGIS, established the population-transportation medical spatial database and attribute database based on the data of health service network, population, settlement and traffic in rural area. Secondly, used network analysis tools to analyze the spatial pattern of medical services, and evaluated the accessibility by the method of minimum impedance. Thirdly, analysised the equalization of basic medical services based on Lorentz curve and Gini coefficient, then gave some advices about the equalization path.From the research we can find some results like following. Firstly, the basic medical service of Honghu has a large regional difference in accessibility. In general, the level of accessibility from Xindi to other residential decreased gradually, and the residential which near the city center, road or town center seem to have a high level in accessibility. Take each town as a research unit, we can see that the level of accessibility between different town is unbalanced. Xindi is the regional health care center, and the accessibility of the northwest town are higher than the southeastern towns. Secondly, the level of health care equalization in Honghu is low, it exists a far distance between urban and rural area. The conditions for the development of health care in Xindi is better than other towns, regional development is unbalanced. Thirdly, to improve regional equalization of basic health services, we can take some methods like:increase the investment in medical workers and health care facilities, improve the quality of health care and narrow regional disparities; at the same time to establish a rational system of transfer payments, increase basic financial support for health services; target for Fengkou and Datonghu for special investment to equal the unbalanced status of basic health care; strengthen the settlements and traffic network planning, improve the spatial accessibility of medical care; improve the new rural cooperative medical care system, to solve the people’s medical problems.