Mapping and quantifying travel time to define health facility catchment areas in Blantyre city in Malawi

Abstract

Background 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. Methods 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. Results When these catchments are compared with georeferenced patients originating communities (based on malaria records), an average of 90.3 percent of the patients come from communities within the generated catchments. Conclusions 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.