Based on the linked source; automatically prepared and checked against the original report.
Study scope
Researchers assessed how the geography of the All-Wales Posture and Mobility Service affects wheelchair users’ travel burden, focusing on rural access. The cross-sectional analysis covered 43,790 wheelchair users living across 1,917 Welsh lower super output areas. It used road-network travel times and demand-weighted mixed-integer p-median optimisation to test service configurations.
Measures and baseline
Ten scenarios included the baseline, unconstrained arrangements, clinic relocations and satellite additions. Researchers compared median and maximum travel times, the share of users within 30 or 60 minutes of a service, and a demand-weighted Gini coefficient. Baseline median travel time was 19.22 minutes, with a Gini coefficient of 0.3562.
Satellite findings
Relocating individual clinics produced negligible spatial-equity improvement. Adding one satellite in west Wales reduced Pembrokeshire’s median travel time by 42.4 minutes and lowered the Gini coefficient to 0.329 without worsening access in any local authority. A second satellite in mid Wales reduced it further to 0.2868; the configurations remained stable in bootstrap sensitivity analysis.
