Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Successful PhD defense of Pablo Cabrera-Barona within the Doctoral College "GIScience"

Pablo Cabrera-Barona, PhD researcher at Z_GIS successfully defended his PhD Thesis “A Multidisciplinary Spatial Framework for Health Inequalities Analysis with Emphasis on Deprivation and Healthcare Accessibility”.

In his research, Pablo focused on the analysis of deprivation and healthcare accessibility, understanding them as integral concepts that incorporate objective and subjective measures, the integration of which enables the representation of multidimensional health-related phenomena. Pablo provided a multidisciplinary spatial framework that uses different mixed-methods approaches to understand health inequalities.

The results showed that the created deprivation indices facilitate the identification of social disadvantages and can support the explanation of health outcomes. It was also shown that the combination of objective measures and perceptions can represent inequalities of multidimensional healthcare accessibility and healthcare satisfaction and that these multidimensional measures can be explained by social factors of human health-related behavior. It could also be demonstrated that area-level features of deprivation and spatial accessibility to healthcare influence individual-level healthcare satisfaction.

Around 30 attendees from 14 different nations listened to Pablo’s impressive presentation which was followed by a fruitful discussion between the evaluators, Dr. Alexis Comber from the University of Leeds and Dr. Stefan Lang from Z_GIS. Dr. Thomas Blaschke as the main supervisor acted as the chair.

We wish Pablo all the best for his future endeavors and career!