A Novel Method for Defining Health Facility Catchment Areas in a Low Income Country

The catchment area of a health-care facility is used to assess health service utilization and calculate population-based rates of disease. Current approaches for catchment definition have significant limitations such as being based solely on distance from the facility or using an arbitrary threshold for inclusion.

Objective

We propose a simple statistical method, the cumulative case ratio, for defining a catchment area using surveillance data.