The Use of Travel Time to Measure Geographic Accessibility to Breast Screening Services in New South Wales, Australia Short Paper.

In 2018, the World Health Organization set a goal to increase the proportion of breast cancers identified at an early stage. Early detection allows for more effective treatment and a reduction in the risk of death from breast cancer. Poor access may restrict participation in screening, diagnostic and treatment services, with flow-on effects on stage at diagnosis and survival. This paper presents spatial analysis of travel time to breast screening services in New South Wales, Australia to measure the geographic accessibility of services to the population they serve. The travel time surface was created using a friction surface that estimates the time required to traverse each pixel within a global grid, and a least cost path algorithm to find the optimised route from each output pixel to the breast screen services. The friction surface was derived using a set of input layers, with the roads layer being the most critical for defining travel times. The generated surface of travel time to breast screen services in New South Wales has shown that over 90% of the population are within 20 min' drive time of either a fixed or mobile breast screen service and that 100% of the population are within 100 min' drive time of a breast screen service. The ability to identify and measure spatial variations in geographic accessibility via travel time is vital to plan breast screening services and reduce inequalities in health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]