Development of a Spatial Accessibility Index for Assessing Health Infrastructure Using AHP Approach: A Case Study of Andhra Pradesh State

India, the largest populated country in the world with a diversified lifestyle based on regions and economic conditions of the people, provides primary health care for all its citizens which is vital to any government. The accessibility to health infrastructure in rural areas is challenging for the government. The national-level guidelines and policies are in place for developing the infrastructure. Still, there is a need to study the location and its accessibility to health infrastructure. A spatial composite index would help quantify health infrastructure distribution over an area. The health infrastructure inventory like government hospitals, medical stores, blood banks, laboratories and anganwadi centres are primary indicators. The roads and built-up extents support infrastructure indicators that influence access to health infrastructure. The geolocation and its distribution of indicators across the study area in a GIS environment have the uttermost significance. The quantification of geo-located infrastructure is vital to understand its availability and shortfalls. The paper attempts to showcase the methodology of analysing the geospatial outputs representing the infrastructure variability in the Andhra Pradesh state. The Euclidean distance algorithm enabled to quantify the distribution of health infrastructure. Moreover, integrating a multicriteria decision-making approach of different health infrastructure indicators has brought out the spatial accessibility index. The classification of the variability of the spatial accessibility index into five different categories allows policy-maker to concentrate on the areas of poor variability for planning and building developmental goals. The classified accessibility index over the built-up extent provided the goals of immediate concentration when its impact of variability over the population and households was analysed.