PhD student, Gaëlle T. Sehi, MPH, studying under the mentorship of Daniel Parker, PhD, assistant professor of population health and disease prevention, is presenting her research at the American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene Annual Meeting at the beginning of November.
The ASTMH annual meeting is the premier international forum for the exchange of scientific advances in tropical medicine, hygiene and global health. Sehi’s research on the spatial analysis of geographic access to public healthcare facilities in Côte d’Ivoire is pertinent to the conference’s mission. The findings of Sehi’s research will be useful for policymakers and government officials to improve access to healthcare in marginalized areas of Côte d’Ivoire where the landscape is complex geographically and travel capacity can vary seasonally.
Sehi’s research methods included analyzing various sources of open-source data including the locations of healthcare facilities, population distribution, road network, water bodies elevation, and land cover. The data was paired with plausible travel scenarios within a cost-distance algorithm in AccessMod (version 5) to generate gridded layers of travel times to the nearest facility, in increasing complexity. Sehi found extreme heterogeneity in access across the landscape. Areas with poor access to healthcare facilities were clustered in the northern part of the nation.
“If access to health care is considered a human right, who is considered human enough to have that right?” – Paul Farmer
For more information about the ASTMH meeting, please visit their website.
