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Population ageing is fast becoming a major social concern across the globe. This ageing trend unavoidably fuels elders’ demand for healthcare services. As the main users of health care service, whether the healthcare is geographically approachable in local areas is more imperative to senior residents with restricted mobility. This paper proposes to examine the effect of elders’ healthcare accessibility on property prices of Taipei Metropolis, Taiwan.

Luo and Qi’s (2009) enhanced two-step floating catchment area method – taking both healthcare demand and supply into account – was used to measure three types of healthcare services: “physician-to-elder ratio”, “hospital bed-to-elder ratio” and “ambulance-to-elder ratio”. Spatial quantile regression (SQR) model was then used to examine the spatial effect of healthcare accessibility on different property price ranges.

The “physician-to-elder ratio” and “hospital bed-to-elder ratio” demonstrated expected consistent positive effects across all quantiles of property prices (p < 0.01) in SQR, and its effects aggravated as the quantiles of property prices rose. The “ambulance-to-elder ratio” demonstrated a non-linear influence on property prices (i.e. a negative effect on lowest quantile prices but a positive on higher quantile prices) possibly due to the semi-obnoxious characteristic of the ambulance. That is, residents living in lower priced neighbourhoods may dislike ambulances’ annoying sound of sirens (i.e. ambulances’ disamenity), while residents living in higher valued neighbourhoods may on the contrary appreciate ambulances’ healthcare services (i.e. amenity).

These findings are expected to offer some insights for government’s policies in providing elders in their later years with good residential quality and easy access to healthcare resource.

This paper is one of the few studies that consider the capitalization of the spatial healthcare accessibility to elders into property prices. In this ageing trend across the globe, although all the accessibility to medical resources should be equally critical, the application of spatial quantile regression revealed residents’ inconsistent tendency against semi-obnoxious ambulances. It provides a different perspective in defining the importance of healthcare accessibility in neighbourhoods.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the spatial accessibility of primary healthcare facility in Ghanaian rural areas, by determining the barriers to healthcare accessibilities in the Amansie Central District.

Both network and proximity analyses were performed on the digitized data such as road networks, settlements, population, district boundary, natural resources (rivers, streams and forest) and site location (health facilities). To quantify the population who have access to healthcare the authors used the Ghana Health Service access criteria that health facility should be accessible to an estimated population within 8 km radius from the facility.

The overall mean distance to the nearest health facility in the district was 8.9 km. Fiankoma sub-district recorded the highest mean distance whereas Tweapease sub-district recorded the least. In general, 31.2 percent of the district population has no access to healthcare facility. Transportation was identified to be one of the major hindrances to healthcare accessibility and this was as a result of poor road network in the district.

The study was restricted to the Amansie Central District of Ghana. This limits the extent of generalization of results.

The study proposed additional sites for siting new health facilities base on criteria such as population, distance, centrality and existing infrastructural development. This will consequently improve healthcare accessibility and utilization by increasing total coverage closer to 100 percent.

Self-evaluated access and accessibility has been found to be associated with healthcare seeking and quality of life. Studies have shown that, however, a vast majority of individuals with disability living in poor countries have limited access to healthcare influenced by several barriers. The purpose of this paper is to compare the perception of general accessibility of health care services and its association with access barriers and other contextual factors between people with physical disabilities and counterparts without disability.

This study is a cross sectional survey involving 213 individuals with physical disabilities and 213 counterparts without disability sampled using a multi-stage method. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire with sections on socioeconomic and living conditions, education, health, employment and access to health care. Data analysis involved using χ² for proportions and T-test and multiple regressions (stepwise) method to determine significant factors that influence perception on accessibility.

The study finds that people with disabilities fared worse in various socioeconomic factors such as education, employment, income and assets possession. People with disabilities also experience more dimensional barriers and reported poor health system accessibility. The difference in accessibility continued after adjusting for other variables, implying that there are more inherent factors that explain the perception of access for people with disabilities.

Governments should ensure equitable access to health care delivery for people with disabilities through equitable health policies and services that are responsive to the needs of people with disabilities and promote the creation of enabling environment to enhance participation in health care delivery.

The authors confirm that the paper has neither been submitted to peer review, nor is in the process of peer reviewing or accepted for publishing in another journal. The author(s) confirms that the research in this work is original, and that all the data given in the paper are real and authentic. If necessary, the paper can be recalled, and errors corrected. The undersigned authors transfer the copyright for this work to the International Journal of Health Governance. The authors are free of any personal or business association that could represent a conflict of interest regarding the paper submitted, and the authors have respected the research ethics principles.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the situation of accessibility to reproductive health rights, and the conditional factors of accessibility to such rights of adolescents.

A qualitative method was used to extract information from 80 informants. Data were collected through in-depth interview, focus group discussion, observation, data recording, audio recording and the review of related documents during August to October 2016.

Adolescents had not accessed to their right on informing of their decision making; information and education; health; confidentiality and privacy; and treating with equity and no discrimination. Also, the conditional factors influenced to the accessibility on such rights were lacking of knowledge on reproductive health and negative attitude toward this matter among the people concerned. There were still no regulations or policies on the performance of authority agencies and the factors on social dimensions, traditions, customs, sexual culture and religion.

The findings from this study would be a help to promote the accessibility for adolescents to reproductive health rights under the Prevention and Solution of Adolescent Pregnancy Problem Act, B.E. 2559 (2016) specific on standard criteria reproductive health services from hospitals and the involvement from Ministry of Education for the development of sex life skill and reproductive health for the teacher.

Policymakers push online health services delivery, relying on consumers to independently engage with online services. Yet, a growing cluster of vulnerable patients do not engage with or disengage from these innovative services. There is a need to understand how to resolve the tension between the push of online health service provision and unengagement by a contingent of health-care consumers. Thus, this study aims to explore the issue of digital unengagement (DU) (i.e. the active or passive choice to engage or disengage) with online health services to better inform service design aligned to actual consumer need.

Adopting a survey methodology, a group of 486 health services consumers with a self-declared (acute or chronic) condition were identified. Of this group, 110 consumers were classified as digitally unengaged and invited to write open-ended narratives about their unengagement with online health services. As a robustness check, these drivers were contrasted with the drivers identified by a group of digitally engaged consumers with a self-declared condition (n = 376).

DU is conceptualized, and four levels of DU drivers are identified. These levels represent families of interrelated drivers that in combination shape DU: subjective incompatibility (misalignment of online services with need, lifestyle and alternative services); enactment vulnerability (personal vulnerabilities around control, comprehension and emotional management of online services); sharing essentiality (centrality of face-to-face co-creation opportunities plus conflicting social dependencies); and strategic scepticism (scepticism of the strategic value of online services). Identified challenges at each level are the mechanisms through which drivers impact on DU. These DU drivers are distinct from those of the digitally engaged group.

Adding to a nascent but growing literature on consumer unengagement, and complementing the engagement literature, the authors conceptualize DU, positioning it as distinct from, not simply a lack of, consumer engagement. The authors explore the drivers of DU to provide insight into how DU occurs. Encapsulating the dynamic nature of DU, these drivers map the building blocks that could help to address the issue of aligning the push of online service provision with the pull from consumers.

This paper offers insights on how to encourage consumers to engage with online health services by uncovering the drivers of DU that, typically, are hidden from service designers and providers impacting provision and uptake.

There is a concern that there will be an unintentional disenfranchisement of vulnerable segments of society with a generic policy emphasis on pushing online services. The paper sheds light on the unforeseen personal and social issues that lead to disenfranchisement by giving voice to digitally unengaged consumers with online health services.

Offering a novel view from a hard-to-reach digitally unengaged group, the conceptualization of DU, identified drivers and challenges inform policymakers and practitioners on how to facilitate online health service (re)engagement and prevent marginalization of segments of society.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a GIS application created for health care planning at Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. The application covers important health care facilities planning issues including defining accessibility to health care facilities, identifying and classifying the distribution of health demand at Jeddah city and modeling spatial variation of patient locations.

In order to build this application, a geo‐database is created that covers points, lines and polygon features such as health care facility location, road network and population districts. In addition, raster surface models are produced using Kriging function which produces raster surfaces for predicting health demand values at the study area.

The outputs of this application can be used to help health care planners in evaluating the existing location of health care facilities and see if these locations are concentrated at certain city districts. In addition, local health planners can use the created models when deciding where to allocate a new health care facility at Jeddah city.

This application is considered as a spatial decision support system for health planners in Jeddah city. It can be used to define and evaluate location of health centers as well as to identify the spatial accessibility to health centers.

This study aims to assess the accessibility of women to health-care facilities in the rural areas with a view to unties possible recommendation of enhancing its service delivery. It provides an insight into the levels of satisfaction of the services provided by conventional health-care providers in the area where the majority in the developing countries concentrated. The study unravels the reasons for the low patronage of regular health-care facilities to boost unscientific ones by rural women.

The study relies on extensive field work conducted in the study area mainly rural nature. data was sourced by questionnaire, mainly administered on the women in the area and field observation. Data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics.

The paper provides information on the low socio-economic attributes of rural women. It is further showed that medical facilities and personnel were not relatively available and performed in health-care centres to the satisfaction of the users. Poor roads, poor human relation, low quality of services, inadequate medical personnel and drug shortage hindrance to women accessing appropriate health-care facilities in the rural areas. Rural women, therefore, opted for self-medication folk medicine, disguising and spiritual remedies. Health-care facilities suffered poor patronage as a result of these obstacles The study recommended proper overhauling of health-care facilities.

The paper builds a relationship on the reasons for health-care facilities neglect in the rural area in developing countries and revealed unscientific means by which health care needs are realised rural women.

In this article visible minority immigrant women's encounters and perceptions in accessing healthcare in Canada are explored. The aim is to understand the role play of the vulnerability statuses, gender, visibility, immigration and their intersectionality as factors contributing to (in)equitiesin healthcare accessibility.

Qualitative data were collected from a sample of 32 adult immigrant women, living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, using five focus group meetings. The participants have migrated from five regions of the world; South‐Eastern Asia, Middle‐Eastern Asia, the African continent, Latin/South America and non‐English speaking countries in Eastern Europe. Data were analysed using an inductive coding using the cultural health capital framework.

The findings reveal that audio and visual personal attributes such as skin colour, accent and excess body weight that are beyond Canadian norms lead to unfavourable interpersonal dynamics. Fundamental causes of diseases and clinical discourses are embedded in ethno‐cultural realties of gender, ethno‐racial identity, English communication styles and immigration related economic downturns.

Individual level recommendations include self efficacy and empowerment. Policies and program level recommendations include enhancement of multicultural realms of healthcare to promote equity in healthcare accessibility.

Utilization of cultural health capital framework to illustrate inequities in healthcare accessibility, for visible and audible minority immigrant women, living in a country with universal healthcare coverage, brings a novel conceptual approach. New policy implications stemmed from the original research findings. Canadian cultural health capital framework that was developed in this article can be applied to illustrate other minorities' healthcare accessibility.

The world was facing significant aging challenges. Aging in place has long been advocated which reflected the preference of older people to stay in their own home as long as possible. A huge amount of older people resided in private buildings that consist of both indoor settings (i.e. individual unit flats) and outdoor settings (i.e. common areas like lobby and corridor). The effect of indoor environment on the quality of life of the older people has been investigated, while this paper aims to examine the different effect of common areas environment for the older people.

A questionnaire survey was administered among over 300 older people living in private buildings. Multiple statistical techniques, including reliability test, correlation coefficient and multiple regression models, were used to analyze the collected data to determine the interactions between facilities management of the common areas in private buildings and the environment domain of quality of life for older people.

The final results were concluded based on the congruence of all the statistical results, which covered the identification of facilities management factors in common areas of private buildings that could influence the environment domain of quality of life for older people, including overall environment, health-care accessibility, information acquisition and transportation aspects; the overall environment was positively predicted by space and security in common areas of private building; health-care accessibility was positively affected by space, barrier-free facilities and recreational facilities; the information acquisition was only positively predicted by security; transportation was positively predicted by distance and recreational facilities; and building services of common areas in private buildings had no effect on the environment domain of quality of life for older people.

Practical recommendations have been made to improve the facilities management of common areas in private buildings to ensure the quality of life for older people, including provision of walking assistance, motion or infrared controlled systems and so on. This study contributed to enhance current understanding of the interactions between the older people and their living environment.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate socio-economic inequalities in the use, accessibility and satisfaction with health services amongst 60-84 year old people from seven European urban communities.

Data for this study were collected in 2009. The target population was people aged 60-84 years from Stuttgart (Germany), Athens (Greece), Ancona (Italy), Kaunas (Lithuania), Porto (Portugal), Granada (Spain) and Stockholm (Sweden). The total sample comprised 4,467 respondents with a mean response rate across these countries of 45.2 per cent.

The study demonstrated that the majority of respondents had contact with a health care provider within the last 12 months. The highest percentages were reported by respondents from Spain (97.8 per cent) and Portugal (97.7 per cent). The results suggest that 13.0 per cent of respondents had refrained from seeking care services. The highest rates were amongst seniors from Lithuania (24.0 per cent), Germany (16.2 per cent) and Portugal (15.4 per cent). Logistic regression suggests that seniors who refrained from seeking health care was statistically significant associated with those with higher levels of education (odds ratios (OR)=1.21; 95 per cent confidence intervals (CI)=1.01-1.25) and financial strain (OR=1.26; 95 per cent CI=1.16-1.37). Furthermore, the majority of respondents were satisfied with health care services.

The findings from the “Elder Abuse: a multinational prevalence survey” study indicate the existence of significant variations in use, accessibility and satisfaction with health services by country and for socio-economic factors related to organizing and financing of care systems.