ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Aging and Public Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1679888
Assessing the Accessibility of Elderly Care Facilities by Integrating the Choice Preferences of the Elderly ---A Case Study of Fuzhou's Main Urban Area, China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou, China
- 2Zhangzhou Health Vocational College, Zhangzhou, China
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Against the backdrop of rapid population aging in China, optimizing the spatial allocation of elderly care facilities has become increasingly important. This study evaluates both objective and preference-based accessibility to address gaps in precision planning for aged care. Focusing on Fuzhou's main urban area, this research investigates three facility types: elderly care institutions, community day care centers, and home-based care service stations. Using a modified Gaussian two-step floating catchment area (MG2SFCA) method with residential communities as analytical units, this research conduct accessibility analysis integrated with elderly choice preferences to quantify disparities between actual and willingness-weighted accessibility. Findings reveal significant spatial mismatches between facility distribution and elderly needs 2 across all three types. Building on this, we develop street-level typological classifications (Gain/Attenuation/Risk) to propose context-specific optimization strategies. The study's innovations lie in: (1) advancing analytical precision through micro-scale community units, and (2) incorporating subjective care preferences into spatial evaluation models, thereby providing evidence-based planning references for age-friendly city development.
Keywords: elderly care service facilities, Spatial accessibility, improved Gaussian two-step floating catchment area method, Fuzhou's main urban area, subjective willingness
Received: 05 Aug 2025; Accepted: 13 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Wu, Lin and Yan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Qiuyi Zhang, zhangqy@fjut.edu.cn
Gang Lin, 19912525@fjut.edu.cn
Xiaofen Yan, 1019919471@qq.com
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