Evaluating the Improvement of Healthcare Accessibility for Urban Residents via the Construction of New Hospitals: A Case Study of Xi’an, China

Recently, several big cities have been faced with rapid expansion of the population in China, ultimately leading to unprecedented pressure on urban healthcare facilities. Thus, new healthcare facilities are established to meet residents’ increasing demand for healthcare. Under the current circumstances, an essential task was to evaluate the improvement of these new facilities to residents’ healthcare accessibility. In this study, the rapid development city of Xi’an, China was employed as the case study, and the Gaussian-based 2SFCA method was utilized to measure the spatial distribution of high-level healthcare accessibility by private cars and public transit. The change in accessibility could be obtained by quantifying the difference in accessibility before and after establishment of the new hospitals. Furthermore, the improvement in equity in healthcare accessibility was measured using the Gini coefficient. Finally, the contribution of each new hospital to healthcare accessibility was evaluated from the perspectives of population coverage, average improvement of each bed, and improvement of the Gini coefficient. The results show that the areas with significant improvement are scalloped to the periphery of the study area, especially in the communities near the new hospitals. What’s more, a slight improvement could also be observed in the equity of healthcare accessibility after the construction of the new hospitals. These results could provide guidance for optimizing and allocating healthcare facilities.