Global maps of travel time to emergency and tertiary hospitals
Abstract
Global estimates of access to health care treat every facility alike. Drive time was routed on the OpenStreetMap network from all 217,841 of its hospitals and 15-, 30- and 60-minute isochrones dissolved for nested capability tiers, weighted with GHS-POP 2025. 96.2% of the world's population lives within an hour's drive of a hospital, 78.5% of a hospital with a documented emergency department, and 40.3% of one with a helipad or university name marking tertiary care. The 1.45 billion people within an hour of a hospital but not of an emergency hospital live mainly in South and East Asia and Nigeria; the 312 million beyond an hour of any hospital lie in a belt from the Sahel to Madagascar. Defining the tertiary tier by helipad alone leaves its estimate unchanged, and the isochrone construction shifts the 60-minute figures by a few percent. Counting every facility as equivalent overstates access to time-critical care.
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BibTeX
@misc{emilsson2026global,
title = {{Global maps of travel time to emergency and tertiary hospitals}},
author = {Johan Emilsson},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.12696},
eprint = {2609.12696},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12696},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Global maps of travel time to emergency and tertiary hospitals
AU - Johan Emilsson
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/11
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.12696
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12696
AB - Global estimates of access to health care treat every facility alike. Drive time was routed on the OpenStreetMap network from all 217,841 of its hospitals and 15-, 30- and 60-minute isochrones dissolved for nested capability tiers, weighted with GHS-POP 2025. 96.2% of the world's population lives within an hour's drive of a hospital, 78.5% of a hospital with a documented emergency department, and 40.3% of one with a helipad or university name marking tertiary care. The 1.45 billion people within an hour of a hospital but not of an emergency hospital live mainly in South and East Asia and Nigeria; the 312 million beyond an hour of any hospital lie in a belt from the Sahel to Madagascar. Defining the tertiary tier by helipad alone leaves its estimate unchanged, and the isochrone construction shifts the 60-minute figures by a few percent. Counting every facility as equivalent overstates access to time-critical care.
ER -