ArticleCommunications medicine2025
Mapping and quantifying travel time to define health facility catchment areas in Blantyre city in Malawi.
Article in Communications medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Does plastic waste present an infection hazard? Current evidence, surveillance challenges and research priorities.One health outlook · 2026Review
- Challenges and potential opportunities for improving One Health surveillance in low-resource settings: Insights from rabies surveillance in Malawi.One health outlook · 2026Article
- Spatial distribution and associated factors of public healthcare infrastructure in tourism-oriented environments: evidence from Southwest China in the context of residential tourism.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Spatial Distribution of COVID-19 Diagnostic Services in Mopani District, Limpopo Province, South Africa.Public health challenges · 2025Article
- Updated fine-scale location data for Blantyre district collected using a low-cost approach.Scientific data · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundMapping health facility catchment areas is important for estimating the population that uses the health facility, as a denominator for capturing spatial patterns of disease burden across space. Mapping activities to generate catchment areas are expensive exercises and are often not repeated on a regular basis.
methodsIn this work, we demonstrated the generation of facility catchment areas in Blantyre, Malawi using crowdsourced road data and open-source mapping tools. We also observed travel speeds associated with different means of transportation were made in five randomly selected residential communities within Blantyre city. AccessMod version 5.8 was used to process the generated data to quantify travel time and catchment areas of health facilities in Blantyre city.
resultsWhen these catchments are compared with georeferenced patients originating communities (based on malaria records), an average of 90.3 percent of the patients come from communities within the generated catchments.
conclusionsThe study suggests that crowdsourced data resources can be used for the delineation of catchment areas and this information can confidently be used in efforts to stratify the burden of diseases such as malaria.
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Registered trials
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