Spatial Disparity of HIV/AIDS Service Providers: The Case of Miami-Dade County.

This paper examines the spatial disparity between the HIV/AIDS service providers and the HIV/AIDS patients. The empirical focus is on Miami-Dade, a large metropolitan county in the United States with a Latino population majority and a high AIDS incidence rate. This exploratory study contributes to the existing literature on geographical access to health providers. Geographic Information System (GIS) is used to examine the spatial disparity between the service providers and the patients. The study reveals that aggregate-level analysis masks the reality of the spatial disparity. Miami Dade County's Health Department focuses on aggregate zones for prioritizing its resources. At this level, there is little spatial disparity. However, evidence of spatial disparity emerges at the ZIP-code-level analysis. The major lesson from the study is that health policies need to be based on a finer-grained analysis to address spatial disparity.