Abstract

Accessibility to essential services by a spatially dispersed aging population
Track: Health and Human Services
Authors: Gang-Jun Liu

Spatially dispersed ageing population is becoming a challenging issue for public policy makers in many developed countries. Australia has opted to deal with this unprecedented ageing issue via an 'ageing in place' strategy, and has encountered a number of serious challenges, including the issue of personal mobility and the ability to access those things that are deemed essential to ones well-being and quality of life from outside the home. This paper presents an empirical assessment of micro level manifestations of location disadvantage, in terms of the shortest network distance travelled from residential locations to their nearest essential services and facilities, within residential suburbs of Melbourne using GIS-based spatial analytical procedures and fine spatial resolution data sets. The approaches taken in this study should be useful to public policy makers, and service providers in many countries who will all be confronted by this same policy problem within the next two decades.