COVID-19 services during the pandemic-a scoping review

Appropriate accessibility to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) services is essential in the efficient management of the pandemic. Different geospatial methods and approaches have been used to measure accessibility to COVID-19 health-related services. This scoping review aimed to summarize and synthesize the geospatial studies conducted to measure accessibility to COVID-19 healthcare services. Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed were searched to find relevant studies. From 1113 retrieved unique citations, 26 articles were selected to be reviewed. Most of the studies were conducted in the USA and floating catchment area methods were mostly used to measure the spatial accessibility to COVID-19 services including vaccination centres, Intensive Care Unit beds, hospitals and test sites. More attention is needed to measure the accessibility of COVID-19 services to different types of users especially with combining different non-spatial factors which could lead to better allocation of resources especially in populations with limited resources. Introduction Appropriate access to healthcare services is one of the important aspects of managing infectous disease pandemics including coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Mohammadi et al., 2021). These healthcare services include a wide range of hospitals, intensive care units, test centres, and now vaccination facilities (Silalahi et al., 2020; Kang et al., 2020; Lakhani, 2020; Boitrago et al., 2021; Lakhani and Wollersheim, 2021). Lack of resources and massive volume of requests for healthcare services need a robust geospatial analysis approach to optimize such services (MohammadEbrahimi et al., 2021). Some studies have been conducted to measure accessibility to COVID-19 health and medical care services worldwide with different approaches and research questions (Mollalo et al., 2021). Synthesizing the results of these studies would help both researchers and healthcare policymakers to develop more innovative and efficient work in the future. Access to healthcare services has been defined in different ways (Hoseini et al., 2018). However, most see them as a concept where the degree of access plays a large role. Access can be categorized into spatial and non-spatial (Kiani et al., 2017), where the former is related to geographical access and measured by geographical indices such as distance and travel time. The latter, however, is more about non-geographical indices, such as services cost, acceptability and accommodation. Some studies have also measured an integrated accessibility access score, including spatial and non-spatial factors (Hashtarkhani et al., 2020). For example, Mohammadi et al. (2021) aimed at estimating the potential spatial access to COVID-19 vaccination centres in an urban area and used travel time as a spatial factor and the age structure of urban neighbourhoods as a non-spatial one. In addition to the number and type of factors, spatial and non-spatial, used in various studies, different methodologies based on catchment areas, distance, and density are used. Different studies have been conducted to measure geospatial accessibility to COVID-19 services, but no study has summarized these studies. Thus, this work aimed at a scoping review encompassing any spatial accessibility methods to any of COVID-19 services. The results can be used as a guide to geospatial accessibility studies. Correspondence: Soheil Hashtarkhani, Department of Health Information Technology, Neyshabur University of Medical Sciences, Neyshabur, Iran. E-mail: s.hashtarkhani@gmail.com