Equity in walking access to community home care facility resources for elderly with different mobility: A case study of Lianhu District, Xi’an

Abstract

As the aging of China’s population continues to deepen, a number of elderly care facilities relying on community platforms to provide home care services have been established in urban communities, effectively alleviating the problem of difficult community elderly care, while a spatial mismatch between the facilities and the elderly population has also emerged. To solve this problem, this paper analyzes the equity in walking access to community home care facilities for elderly people with different mobility abilities in Lianhu District of Xi’an City, taking the resources of community home care facilities as the research object. Firstly, the coverage rate of the facilities was calculated based on the 15-minute walking range of the elderly with different mobility, and the accessibility of the facilities was measured using the Kernel Density-type two-step moving search method. Then, Gini coefficient, Lorenz curve and location entropy were used to analyze the spatial matching pattern of facilities and elderly population. The results show that there is a serious spatial mismatch between the resources of community home care facilities and the elderly population with mobility restriction. In addition, the available facility area per capita is low for more than 80% of the elderly with mobility restriction, and the road network density has a significant impact on the access of the elderly with mobility restriction to the community home care facility resources. These research results indicate that the spatial layout and configuration of community home care facilities are unfair to the elderly with poor mobility, and that these elderly care facility configurations do not favor the disadvantaged groups.