How scale matters for healthcare accessibility: implications for territorial planning in France
Analyzing healthcare accessibility though geographic approaches enables decision-makers to identify priority areas and allocate resources more effectively. Changes in scale not only modify the characteristics of the spaces under observation, but also affect the assessment that informs social, political, or economic decision-making.
This paper examines and visualizes how shifts in scale influence the definition of healthcare accessibility in France — considering general practitioners, primary care providers, and services— as well as supply dynamics and socio-health needs. The study compares three spatial scales: municipalities, and two supra-municipal scales —territoires de vie santé used by the public authorities to define medically underserved areas, and Inter-municipal Cooperation (EPCI), employed by policymakers for local projects. A three-step method comprising scoring, principal component analysis and clustering, was applied to s...

