Accessibility of Public Sector Institutions for People with Special Needs in Polish Regions

Abstract

Social inclusion is one of the important conditions for sustainable socio-economic development. However, one of the paths leading to social inclusion is to ensure a high level of accessibility of institutions for people with special needs. The study described in the present paper examined the accessibility of Polish public sector bodies based on data from government reports (comprehensive study). Accessibility is a feature that should be offered as a complementary service offered to both individuals and legal entities during epidemic emergencies and beyond. The limited accessibility of public institutions is a significant obstacle to the full well-being of the population. Indicating differences in the spatial dispersion of this phenomenon in Poland was the basis for undertaking research for this article. Three areas of accessibility were tested: physical (architectural) accessibility, digital (web) accessibility, and ICT accessibility. A synthetic measure of accessibility was constructed for the study and used to rank Polish voivodeships (provinces, NUTS 2) from highest to lowest. Clustering was used to identify similar regions. The highest- and lowest-scoring regions were the Mazowieckie voivodeship (capital city—Warsaw) and the Podkarpackie voivodeship (capital city—Rzeszów), respectively. Legal accessibility requirements are the biggest driver of further accessibility improvements for voivodeships.