Access to Health Care
Types of Access and Measures to Health Care
Access to care has been defined as the availability of healthcare services when needed by
a patient at any time. While many factors such as insurance, type of service and specialization
contribute to the access to care, equity access has been a problem in the United States. The
Andersen model had proposed that access to care should be determined by whether the services
are available when needed by patients. Also, the access could mean the potential entry of a
patient to an established healthcare system. Andersen model, as emphasized by Babitsch, Gohl
and von Lengerke (2012) focused on health utilization as a measure of access to care with
predisposing, enabling and need factors as the main drivers. Therefore, the model cited
geographic characteristics, financial issues and perceived need for care as important in
determining access to care in different contexts (Babitsch, Gohl & von Lengerke, 2012).
However, most researchers have studied types of access to care, including their measures by
focusing on different aspects.
First, service availability can define access to care. As a dimension to care, this type of
access expects a service to available when a patient needs it. The opportunity of a health center
to provide a service at any given point can be used to show access to care. Researchers have used
the number of hospital beds and doctors as indicators of the level of access to care (Levesque,
Harris & Russell, 2013). Indeed, most centers differ in the number of available doctors or
hospital beds per capita, which could imply different levels of access to care for each. The
variations have been used to determine the resources for individual hospitals, which have a
significant impact on the accessibility of care. However, some researchers have suggested that
access only points to supply without considering the demand (Quinn et al., 2017). Others have
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