Objectives The study of medical facilities accessibility is a critical method to analyze the convenience of accessing medical services in a region. Existing research mainly focuses on potential accessibility (PA) research, and few studies have analyzed the revealed accessibility (RA) based on the actual use of medical facilities.
Methods The main urban area of Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, China, is taken as the study area, and the actual travel distance decay function is fitted by introducing the user̓s actual choice weight and the comprehensive service capacity of healthcare facilities using droplet travel data to improve the three-step search method model for calculating RA. Then, we compare it with the PA calculated based on the service capacity of medical facilities and potential medical needs to analyze the degree of mismatch between them, identify the types of community access to medical facilities, and analyze their spatial distribution characteristics.
Results The PA is mainly affected by the travel time, and the difference between the central area and the peripheral area is large, but the difference between different districts is not obvious. The RA is mainly affected by the number of medical trips, and the difference between each district is obvious. 182 communities with “RA>PA” are mainly distributed in Chenghua District and Jinniu District, and 243 communities with “RA<PA” are mainly distributed in Wuhou District.
Conclusions The results of correlation analysis show that the spatial differentiation of the two types of communities is mainly affected by the RA. Compared with traditional PA research, the RA makes it easier to find the actual differences in the use of medical facilities in different regions, judge the accuracy of the PA, and help relevant departments find problems in the layout of medical facilities.
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