ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on fairly predictable but very important aspects of the health care system. The study of the Kings Lynn health district showed facilities to be heavily concentrated in the main urban centre with its new district general hospitals (DGH) opened in 1980. The spatial patterning and supply of health services is an aspect of health care that most impinges itself on the consciousness of the consumer. It is natural that geographers should emphasise spatial patterning and location in their studies of health care delivery but it is equally important that this should not substitute for a deeper understanding of the process and mechanisms which determine where, when and by whom health services should be consumed. A geographical analysis of spatial patterning must be as responsive to the outcomes of social change as to the shifts in political and economic forces which determine the inputs.
