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10 million US children live farther than 60 miles from pediatric surgeon
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Research using United States census data from 2010 found that more than 10 million children lived farther than 60 miles from the closest pediatric surgeon. Researchers found disparities in race, ethnicity and age related to children’s proximity to a surgeon as well.
“While access to health care and barriers to health care are complicated topics, it is clear that distance to care is an important factor to consider,” Lt. Christian S. McEvoy MD, MPH, a resident in the department of general surgery at the Naval Medical Center Portsmouth and a research fellow with the Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center, told Infectious Diseases in Children.
In their analysis, McEvoy and colleagues identified 716 pediatric surgeons practicing across 374 distinct locations, and 73,690,271 children (median age, 7.5 years).
The researchers said there was one pediatric surgeon for every 102,919 children. More than 30% of nonwhite Hispanic children and about 41% of Native American children lived farther than 40 miles from a pediatric surgeon. The youngest children in the study — those aged 0 to 5 years — lived a median of 14.2 miles from the closest pediatric surgeon, and slightly more than 3 million of these children lived more than 60 miles away.
“Previous efforts to describe these distances have required expensive software and proprietary data,” McEvoy said. “We have described a method of reporting distance between providers, of any type, and children using free software and publicly available data (the U.S. Census) in anticipation of the upcoming 2020 U.S. Decennial Census.” – by Bruce Thiel
Reference:
McEvoy C, et al. Geographic distance to pediatric surgical care within the continental United States. Presented at: AAP National Conference & Exhibition; Nov. 2-6, 2018; Orlando, Fla.
Disclosure: McEvoy reports no relevant financial disclosures.