Examining the factors responsible for the variation in accessibility to health care facilities in Tamale, Ghana

One of the current issues of discussions in recent times is on rapid population growth in the coming years and its accompanied consequence that is expected to take place in urban cities of developing counties and not in rural communities. Rapid population growth often occurs with its accompanied consequences rendering parts of cities not conducive for a living. To curb this accompanied consequence of population growth, analysts came out with a good number of critical socio-economic issues that needs to be addressed ahead of the expected growth. These include attainable sanitation measures, adequate healthcare facilities and schools, different sources of income, sufficient open space for recreations etc. Among these critical socio-economic issues, is adequate and accessible healthcare facility, which many suggest should be given the greatest attention, for health is so important that it is sometimes equated to wealth of the people. Literature reviewed portrays that most researchers in measuring accessibility to healthcare facilities, concentrated on socio-economic factors of the inhabitants and geographical distance factors without much assessment of the spatial structure of the city. This necessitated the research that is to examine the factors responsible for the variations to healthcare facilities in an urban city of Tamale in Ghana, using ArcMap online data and data from Tamale Municipal Planning Unit and Tamale Health Directorate. The healthcare facilities are categorized as government and private and according to hierarchy. The data is analyzed using methods of spatial analysis such as (1) Voronoi diagrams to illustrate the catchment area of each healthcare facilities;(2) Network analyst to estimate the service areas of government and private healthcare facilities; and (3) Graph-theory-based centrality indices to estimate levels of accessibility to each of the government and private healthcare facilities. The results reveal that the spatial distributions of healthcare facilities do not meet the needs of the population distribution. Also, there are major differences in accessibility levels of spatial distributions of public and private healthcare facilities. Healthcare facilities should be located at central parts of the city where there exist concentrations of population to have access to these facilities. Keywords: Accessibility, health care facilities, population, Tamale