ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of more conventional ways of thinking about accessibility as a product of the health care utilization behaviour of older persons. It offers some thoughts about approaches to accessibility that begin to come to terms with the central challenges, and potential, of geographical gerontology. The chapter considers accessibility issues as an integral feature of the way in which older persons experience health and social care and how these experiences are necessarily bound up with processes of emplacement. The changing social and technological conditions signal the need for better models of spatial behaviour. That is, the ways in which older people move about in space are influenced and constrained by a wide range of personal and social considerations and not simply by travel time and distance. The chapter concludes with a call for a greater engagement with the contextual and institutional aspects of health care accessibility as a means to realize the full potential of geographical gerontology.
