An age-integrated approach to improve measurement of potential spatial accessibility to emergency medical services for urban areas

Objective: This study aimed to develop an age-included approach to measure the potential accessibility to Emergency medical services (EMS) across urban and suburban areas of Mashhad city in Iran. Methods: We used an improved version of two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) and enhanced 2SFCA (E2SFCA) methods to measure the potential accessibility to EMS services with inclusion of age factor. This enabled us to better model accessibility of the older population to the EMS. We used 22 800 records of EMS enquiries from July to September 2018 to evaluate and assess the potential improvement in access to the EMS with incorporating age in the model. Results: Suburb areas had less potential accessibility compared with central urban due to the high density of EMS stations in the city center areas. Our model showed slight improvement in potential accessibility measurement as a result of the proposed age-integrated method. Conclusion: An age-integrated index of accessibility method takes into account the age distribution of the population in service area is highly associated with actual measures of accessibility to EMS services. Identifying areas with poor access to EMS will help policymakers to design better policy planning to allocate resources and improve provision of EMS services.