In the SoteDataLab project, we are creating travel time data that includes travel times by car from fine 250 m x 250 m map frames to health stations in minutes. Travel times are calculated by wellness area and cover populated areas. In this blog we will tell you how the material is formed and visualize these travel times in the well-being area of Päijät-Häme. Our goal is to produce openly available material and a tool that can be used, for example, when planning a service network. Please contact us if you have any ideas or wishes for development!
For the time being, travel times have been calculated within a particular wellness area to its health centres
We calculated how long it takes to get to each health centre by car from different parts of the wellness area. The calculation of travel times is based on data that is fully openly available. Information on the location of health stations is collected from the websites of the wellbeing services counties. Information on inhabited squares is also openly available on the 1 km x 1 km level on Statistics Finland's website. To get the accuracy, we divided all mileage squares into smaller, 250 m x 250 m squares. After that, we counted the travel time by car from the center of each screen to those screens where there is a health station. The data have utilised those squares that, according to Statistics Finland, belong in whole or in part to the area under review. Individual inhabited squares may have been omitted from the data if, for example, the coordinates of the square are located on an island or near a water body. However, the share of these missing grid data is very small (for Päijät-Häme 0.1 % in the squares). In the absence of grid data, the average value of the 1 km x 1 km grid has been used, if it has been possible to calculate one. The r5r package of R (version 4.3.2) has been used in the calculation of travel times. The data contains information on travel times within each wellness area. In other words, the data do not include travel times to, for example, health stations in adjacent wellbeing services areas1.
Travel times in Päijät-Häme
Explanation: The map shows how long the travel time from each 250m x250m square is to the nearest health station in the Päijät-Häme wellbeing centre. (Please note that the map does not work on your phone yet, and there may be problems with the functionality of the map in the Safari browser.)
The nearest health centre in Päijät-Häme is at most about an hour's drive away
The map below illustrates the journey time by car in minutes to the nearest health centre in the Päijät-Häme wellness area. Click on the health centre to see the inhabited areas with the shortest travel time to the health centre in question. In addition, by holding the mouse on the square, you can see the travel time to the nearest health centre. You can see on the map that travel times are shorter along large roads (which is expected). At most, the residents of Päijät-Häme take about 60 minutes by car to the nearest health centre. For example, in the northern parts of Iitti and Hartola and east of Heinola, the journey time to the nearest health centre is approximately one hour.
We are further developing the tool – participate and share your ideas/wish!
In the future, we will expand the tool to cover all well-being areas and health centres, as well as emergency clinics and private medical centres of the largest chains. The tool is intended for welfare areas, ministries, private service providers and the media, and it and its data are intended to be made openly available.The tool can be used to examine the location and accessibility of public health stations by car by welfare area.
If the topic raises ideas, wishes or needs in terms of functionalities, the writers and the SoteDataLab team can be contacted at a low threshold.
Can a health centre be replaced by a digital clinic?
Authors of the blog:
Aurora Morén, Meeri Seppä, Alex Kivimäki, Tapio Haaga, Vivi Mauno, Santeri Pigg and other SoteDataLab team (lots. What is Kortelainen, Oskari Nokso-Koivisto, Tanja Saxell and Lauri Sääksvuori).
- Calculating travel times at the level of the whole country is computationally heavy. In addition, health stations are managed on a welfare area-by-area basis, so we believe that a review of the welfare area level is sufficient.[↩]