Geographical distribution of health resources in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia : is it equitable ?

Abstract EN

Introduction: The aim of this study is to evaluate the inequality of geographical distribution of health centers, hospitals, hospital-beds and physicians among the thirteen administrative areas that comprises the map of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

It uses the Lorenz curves and the Gini coefficient.

Methods: A data matrix of the thirteen administrative areas by four health resources was constructed based on the available government data of the Central Department of Statistics and Information (CDSI).

This data matrix is for 22 years starting from 1992 to 2013 for the health resources with the exception of the data for physicians, which is available up to 2007.

To obtain the relative share of an area of each health resource, the total number of it is divided by the corresponding total population of the area.

Total populations, of administrative areas, were projected using the between censuses declared growth rates.

Human population calculator was used to run the projection at this website.

Thus, relative shares are used instead of numbers because they provide a more realistic picture.

Lorenz curves were constructed depending on excel, while Gini coefficients were calculated using an online Gini calculator.

Results: The results of this study have demonstrated that health services are geographically distributed in an equitable manner between administrative areas.

Among the studied health resources, hospital-beds ranks first as the most equitably distributed resource followed by physicians.

Health centers and hospitals came on the third and fourth ranks.

The average Gini coefficients calculated for the period (1997 – 2013) revealed values of 0.1508 for physicians; 0.1854 for hospital-beds; 0.2231 for health centers and 0.2245 for Hospitals.

Conclusion: The study showed that, according to the Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients, the four health resources are equitably distributed among the areas.

This tells us that geographic distribution of health services does not stop health authorities from reaching populations wherever they are in KSA.