Population Health Unit, Kenya Medical Research Institute - Wellcome Trust Research Programme, P.O. Box 43640-00100, Nairobi, Kenya.
Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.
Sci Data. 2019 Jul 25;6(1):134. doi: 10.1038/s41597-019-0142-2.
Health facilities form a central component of health systems, providing curative and preventative services and structured to allow referral through a pyramid of increasingly complex service provision. Access to health care is a complex and multidimensional concept, however, in its most narrow sense, it refers to geographic availability. Linking health facilities to populations has been a traditional per capita index of heath care coverage, however, with locations of health facilities and higher resolution population data, Geographic Information Systems allow for a more refined metric of health access, define geographic inequalities in service provision and inform planning. Maximizing the value of spatial heath access requires a complete census of providers and their locations. To-date there has not been a single, geo-referenced and comprehensive public health facility database for sub-Saharan Africa. We have assembled national master health facility lists from a variety of government and non-government sources from 50 countries and islands in sub Saharan Africa and used multiple geocoding methods to provide a comprehensive spatial inventory of 98,745 public health facilities.
卫生设施是卫生系统的核心组成部分，提供治疗和预防服务，并进行了结构化设计，以便通过一个服务提供越来越复杂的金字塔进行转诊。然而，获得医疗保健是一个复杂的多维概念，从最狭义的角度来看，它是指地理位置的可用性。将卫生设施与人群联系起来一直是医疗保健覆盖的传统人均指数，但是，随着卫生设施的位置和更高分辨率的人口数据，地理信息系统允许对健康获取进行更精细的衡量，定义服务提供方面的地理不平等，并为规划提供信息。最大限度地提高空间健康获取的价值需要对提供者及其位置进行全面普查。迄今为止，撒哈拉以南非洲还没有一个单一的、地理参考的和全面的公共卫生设施数据库。我们从撒哈拉以南非洲的 50 个国家和岛屿的各种政府和非政府来源中收集了国家卫生机构总清单，并使用了多种地理编码方法，提供了 98745 个公共卫生机构的全面空间清单。
