Quantifying Travel Time, Mapping and Validating Health Facility Catchment Areas in Blantyre, Malawi

Abstract

Abstract Mapping health facility catchment areas is important for estimating the population that uses the health facility, as a denominator for capturing spatial patterns of disease burden across space. Mapping activities to generate catchment areas are expensive exercises and are often not repeated on a regular basis. In this work, we demonstrated the generation of facility catchment areas in Blantyre, Malawi using crowdsourced road data and open-source mapping tools. We also observed travel speeds associated with different means of transportation were made in five randomly selected residential communities within Blantyre city. AccessMod version 5.8 was used to process the generated data to quantify travel time and catchment areas of health facilities in Blantyre city. When these catchments were compared with georeferenced patients originating, an average of 94.2 percent of the patients came from communities within the generated catchments. The study suggests that crowdsourced data resources can be used for the delineation of catchment areas and this information can confidently be used in efforts to stratify the burden of diseases such as malaria.