EVALUATION OF ACCESSIBILITY TO HEALTH CENTERS IN THE URBAN AREA OF THE CITY OF VILLAVICENCIO, COLOMBIA
Authors:   Universidad Nacional de Colombia, s Manizales, Facultad de Ingeniería y Arquitectura, Departamento de Ingeniería Civil, Grupo de Investigación en Movilidad Sostenible, Manizales, Colombia, e-mail: aneiras@unal.edu.co, NEIRA Andrea Estefania , ESCOBAR Diego Alexander ,   Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Manizales, Facultad de Ingeniería y Arquitectura, Departamento de Ingeniería Civil, Grupo de Investigación en Movilidad Sostenible, Manizales, Colombia, e-mail: daescobarga@unal.edu.co, MONCADA Carlos Alberto ,   Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Bogotá, Facultad de Ingeniería, Departamento de Ingeniería Civil y Agrícola, Programa de Investigación en Tránsito y Transporte – PIT., Bogotá, Colombia, e-mail: camoncadaa@unal.edu.co
Published: February 2025

The objective of this research is to evaluate the accessibility to health centers located in the urban area of the city of
Villavicencio, taking as reference the indicators of accessibility to health services established by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). To do this, the necessary basic information is collected, which consists of the population
census, the geolocation of the medical care points along with the number of beds - stretchers and doctors available in each of
them, and the travel speeds of the health care network. traffic, the information is subsequently analyzed from a geostatistical
point of view, to finally apply the improved floating catchment area methodology in two steps (E2SFCA). Regarding the
information on health centers, we work with the classification of these activity nodes divided into two groups, on the one hand,
public health centers that deal with those categorized within the State Social Enterprise (ESE), and, on the other hand, private
health centers which provide a particular service; regarding the latter, it was identified during the development of the research,
that the department of Meta presents a high level of affectations generated by affectivity and anxiety disorders, which is why a
large part of the private health centers correspond to specialized centers focused on mental health care and rehabilitation services,
which was identified as a particular panorama, which is why these health centers were excluded from the accessibility analysis, in
order not to obtain inaccurate results. With the above, accessibility indicators were identified for all health centers located in the
urban area of the city of Villavicencio, excluding those focused on mental health care and rehabilitation services, finding that the
results of the indicators obtained show that there is acceptable behavior in terms of accessibility to beds - available stretchers, however,
in relation to doctors, it is evident that there is currently no adequate coverage as established in the aforementioned document. By
carrying out a comparative exercise of the results with other intermediate cities in Colombia such as Armenia, the Central Western
Metropolitan Area (Pereira) and the Manizales – Villamaría Conurbation Area, it is possible to conclude that this behavior is
maintained in all cases, which is why the recommendation is to strengthen the medical staff in intermediate cities of Colombia.