Abstract

To reveal the spatial distribution of women of childbearing age and the allocation of maternal critical care resources, assess the spatial accessibility of critical maternal care resources, and provide a scientific basis for optimizing resource allocation.
Methods: Taking the critical maternal care centers in Jiangsu Province in 2024 as the supply side and the women of childbearing age in Jiangsu Province as the demand side, an integrated service capacity index was constructed using the entropy weight method. Combined with the nearest neighbor method and the Gaussian two-step floating catchment area method, the assessment was conducted from both time and supply-demand dimensions.
Results: The distribution of women of childbearing age mainly concentrated in core cities of the Yangtze River Delta such as Nanjing, Suzhou, and Wuxi. 92.12% of the critical care centers were located in the top 20% of areas with the highest density of women of childbearing age. In terms of time cost, the average time for women of childbearing age in the province to reach the nearest critical care center was 18.55 minutes, with 70.16% of them able to obtain care within 15 minutes, 27.39% within 15-30 minutes, and 2.45% requiring more than 30 minutes. From the supply-demand perspective, within a 15-minute threshold, 69.39% of women of childbearing age could access care, but 30.28% were in a state of low accessibility. Within a 30-minute threshold, 96.47% of women of childbearing age could obtain care. Within a 45-minute threshold, 98.81% of women of childbearing age could obtain care.
Conclusion: The distribution of women of childbearing age in Jiangsu Province shows significant regional clustering characteristics, and resource allocation still needs to be optimized. The accessibility levels in the peri-urban areas of cities and the eastern suburbs of Lianyungang and Yancheng in northern Jiangsu still need to be improved. The "abundance and high quality" of resource-intensive areas has not yet fully translated into fairness and accessibility. In the future, measures such as optimizing the transportation network, adding critical care centers, and enhancing the service capacity at the grassroots level should be taken to reduce regional disparities and improve the fairness and efficiency of resource allocation.