Abstract
The aim of this paper is to explain a new approach for calculating spatial accessibility to primary health care (PHC) services. New Zealand and World Health Organisation (WHO) rules were used to determine acceptable levels of minimum travel time and distance to the closest PHC facilities via a road network. This analysis was applied to 2369 census areas in the 2001 census release with an average population of 76 people and 32 PHC services inside the Otago region. The best route (shortest time) from residential areas to PHC facilities was calculated using the mean centre of population distribution within each meshblock polygon instead of using simple geometric centroids of the Meshblocks. This study has shown that the central and northern parts of the Otago region have some areas with low accessibility levels to PHC.