The referral analysis allows one to compute the travelling times and/or the distances along the least-cost paths (i.e. path between two locations that minimizes the total travel duration for those travelling along it, see Ray and Ebener, 2008) between two groups of health centers. Such path is different from a straight line as it does take into account the landscape constraints together with the modes and speeds of travel of the population.
...
(5) The "Permute group" option allows one to improve computation time when more facilities are selected in the starting group than in the destination one. But if this option is selected, 'Limit the spatial analysis to the closest pair time-wise' is not possible. We will not use this option for the exercise.
(6) The option "Output the layer of the paths among selected facilities", if checked, will output a polyline shapefile with all least-cost paths among all the start-destination pairs of points. We will not use this option for the exercise.
(7) The "Enable parallelization" option, if checked, allows the referral analysis to be parallelized on all available CPUs/cores that your AccessMod instance has access to, if it is possible, and if it is worth doing it with the available memory. If you are using Virtual box, the numbers of available cores can be changed in the settings of VirtualBox (see section 4.2). Using this option can drastically decrease the overall computation time for this analysis. We will not use this option for the exercise.
...
(12) The validation module should indicate that all fields have been correctly filled in (with a green “OK”). If this is the case, you can hit the "Compute" button to launch the analysis. If this is not the case, the "Compute" button will still be in red, and you will have to go through the warning and error message to find out what needs to be adjusted.
A transparent model window with some text and a progress bar will appear in front of the panel while the analysis is being conducted. Please wait until this window disappears to continue using AccessMod. This analysis can take a lot of time to completed especially if the number of health facilities to be processed is high.
...
You can archive these three tables, export them, and open them in Excel to visualize the results. The three tables present the same 6-column structure as presented in the following example (referral nearest by time class):
- from_cat: unique identifier of the "From"health facility, as per the field selected from the attribute table of the health facility layer.
- from_name: name of the "From" health facility, as per the field selected from the attribute table of the health facility layer.
- to_cat: unique identifier of the "To" health facility identified through the analysis, as per the field selected from the attribute table of the health facility layer. In this case, this column contains code of the closest hospital by time from the "From" health facility.
- to_name: name of the "To" health facility identified through the analysis, as per the field selected from the attribute table of the health facility layer. In this case, this column contains the code of the closest hospital, by time, from the "From" health facility.
- distance_km: distance in kilometers between the two health facilities ("From" and "To")
- time_m: travel time in minutes between the two health facilities ("From" and "To")
...
| Note |
|---|
The header for the columns containing the unique identifier and the name of the health facilities will match the label for the field you have selected from the attribute table of the "FROM" and "TO" health facility layers. As mentioned here above, the distance and the travel time columns are included in each of the 3 tables, but their content is only significant for the analysis that each of the resulting file covers (closest by distance, closest by time or all possible combinations). In other words:
AccessMod generates only two tables when checking the "Limit the analysis to the closest destination point in time" option, namely: 1. The one containing the nearest facility within the given time for each "FROM" health facility (referral nearest by time class) 2. The one containing all pair-wise results (referral class) In both tables:
What happens if two facilities are equally "closest by time" ? |
...