Spatio- Temporal detection of accessibility change on health care: A case study for Istanbul

Reaching health centers and hospitals in shorter traveling time is definitive for citizens. To assure that, cities heavily invest in enlargement and development of transportation infrastructure especially by constructing new links. The performance of such investments could be measured via spatial accessibility indices that quantifies the ease of reaching destinations. The most prominent accessibility indices are potential and daily accessibility that take into account development of urban networks and changes in land cover/use. This paper proposes a method for evaluating the accessibility status of the existing hospitals of a selected study area in Istanbul using an integrated Geographical Information System (GIS) and remote sensing framework during the period of 2007-2014. Urban areas as origins and hospitals as destinations were spatially identified, projected on a map and later overlaid with the corresponding street network to perform an O-D matrix to calculate the accessibility indices. The results demonstrated changes in urban spatial distribution and urban road network for the selected area. The infrastructure investments have affected positively both accessibility indices with increase of 47.52% and 38.4% respectively. These changes also positively reflected on public services by decreasing the travel distance to the hospitals in the study area.