An approach to plan and evaluate the location of radiotherapy services and its application in the New South Wales, Australia.

This paper proposes an integrated modelling approach for location planning of radiotherapy treatment services based on cancer incidence and road network-based accessibility. Previous research efforts have established travel distance/time barriers as a key factor affecting access to cancer treatment services, as well as epidemiological studies have shown that cancer incidence rates vary with population demography. Our study is built on the evidence that the travel distances to treatment centres and demographic profiles of the accessible regions greatly influence the uptake of cancer radiotherapy (RT) services.