Migrating accessibility measures to open source

There is a large literature that has explored the use of ‘floating catchment area’ (FCA) techniques in measuring access to a range of primary and secondary health services. This paper describes the development of open source tools which incorporate FCA techniques initially applied in the context of mapping and modelling access to mobile cancer services. Tests completed on the open source tool allow it be used to compare to an existing proprietary tool developed for use in ArcGIS. This study includes reflections on the underlying data used within these models as well as the software itself in order to better understand differences in outputs and computational speed when performing FCA analyses in an open source environment.