The two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is a special case of a gravity model of spatial interaction that was developed to measure spatial accessibility to primary care physicians.12 2SFCA is based on the accessibility measure developed by Shen (1998), who used it to compare accessibility to jobs among workers residing in different locations and traveling by different transportation means, and more generally, to measure accessibility to spatially distributed opportunities that have capacity limitations (i.e., rival goods). 2SFCA was inspired by the spatial decomposition idea first proposed by Radke and Mu (2000).
The 2SFCA method not only has most of the advantages of a gravity model, but is also intuitive to interpret, as it uses essentially a special form of physician-to-population ratio. It is easy to implement in a GIS environment.345 In essence, applying the accessibility measure formulated by Shen (1998) the 2SFCA method is an automated procedure for measuring spatial accessibility as a ratio of primary-care physicians to population, combining two steps:
It has been recently enhanced by considering distance decay within catchments6 and called the enhanced two-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) method.
Furthermore, the use of capping certain services according to nearby population size, can improve the accuracy when analyzing across areas of different environments7 (i.e. rural and urban).
The method has been applied to other related public health issues, such as access to healthy food retailers.8
Luo and Wang 2003a ↩
Luo and Wang 2003b ↩
Wang and Luo, 2005 ↩
Wang, 2006: 80-95 ↩
Luo and Qi, 2009 ↩
McGrail and Humphreys, 2009 ↩
Chen, 2017 ↩