Geographic Methods for Health Services Research: A Focus on the Rural-Urban Continuum

This book is intended to demonstrate the application of analytic geography and cartographic techniques in health services research. Applications of these methods in identifying the problems encountered in the analysis and distribution of disease, various health indicators, and health care resources are depicted and interpreted. Contents: Introduction; A Focus on Rural and Regional Health Care Delivery; Point of Departure: Population Density and Research; Changes and Measures in the Crucial Dimension of Population; Point of Departure: Data Sources for Health Services Research; Access to Health Services; Point of Departure: Access and Cartography; Health Professions Distributions; Point of Departure: Community-Based Measures of Underservice; Point of Departure: Tracking Doctors into the Twenty-First Century; Regionalization of Health Care; Point of Departure: Rural Places and Regionalization; Point of Departure: Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Methods for Defining Medical Service Areas; Point of Departure: Hospital Closure and Access to Hospital Services; Contagious Diseases; Point of Departure: Adjustment of Tuberculosis Incidence Rates; Evaluating Clusters of Adverse Health Outcomes; Point of Departure: State Cancer Control Map and Data Program Analysis; Technical Notes; Glossary of Technical Terms; References; Index.

Thomas C. Ricketts is Director of the North Carolina Rural Health Research Program at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Service Research. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Department of Health Policy & Administration, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill. Lucy A. Savitz is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Health Policy and Administration at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Wilbert M. Gesler is an Associate Professor of Geography at the same university.