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City Know-hows
Many citizens might not realize health-promoting facilities are available in their neighbourhood, even when they are. Personal characteristics, especially financial stress, can help to know which citizens to inform to assure more equitable access.
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Target audience
This research is for urban policymakers and public health officials who focus on reducing health inequalities within cities. Especially, those who are working on ensuring that all citizens have equitable access to health-promoting facilities.
The problem
Significant health inequalities exist between neighbourhoods. Apart from differences in demographics, the neighbourhood environment including facilities has also been found to have a sizeable effect. Despite various health-promoting facilities being objectively available in neighbourhoods, not all citizens perceive them to be available to them. Therefore, some citizens might not make use of important facilities that improve their health. We need to know more about what predicts perceiving facilities as available besides them being objectively there.
What we did and why
We looked at responses of almost 14,000 citizens from Rotterdam across all 72 neighbourhoods about their personal characteristics and how they perceive the availability of three health-promoting facilities in their neighbourhood: medical care, green spaces and sports. We then also collected information on actual objective available facilities in all neighbourhoods. By using statistical analysis, we could see what other factors besides objective availability has an effect on perceived facility availability.
Our study’s contribution
We find that age, sex, education, employment, living with partner, children present in household, financial stress and Dutch illiteracy is related to whether a person perceives the objectively available medical care, green spaces and sports facilities. However, the three facility types differ in which personal characteristics are important in predicting perceived availability. Financial stress is the strongest and only constant predictor, with citizens under financial stress perceiving all three types of facilities to be less available.
Impacts for city policy and practice
Simply investing in additional health-promoting facilities in a neighborhood may not be enough, as not all residents may be aware of their availability. Therefore, policymakers should also increase awareness and actively encourage the use of available health-promoting facilities, particularly among citizens coping with financial stress, to ensure equitable access to these resources. Without those efforts, those who stand to benefit most from these resources may fail to do so.
Further information
Full research article:
[OPEN ACCESS] Perceived vs. objective reality: investigating predictors of perceived availability of health-promoting neighbourhood facilities by Elric Tendron, Inge Merkelbach, Paul Kocken and Semiha Denktas
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