While there is no universally accepted recommendation for distance to a general admission hospital, a 20-minute transportation time is often used as metric to ensure quality health care. So the interactive map and table below give data on the 20-minute drive bands around hospitals in Alabama. The region of the state outside of the drive band could be consider a desert with respect to access to hospital services (and this particular drive time). Although the drive bands may extend into neighboring states, the area and population statistics in the map and table below just correspond to Alabama. These statistics are approximations since a census tract may overlap a drive band and the area outside of the drive band.

Map

The base layer is the state of Alabama. The hospitals are shown as a point layer: the red dots are acute care hospitals, yellow dots are critical access hospitals, and the purple dots are rural emergency hospitals. The 20-minute drive band is shown as an area layer in green. The type of hospital can be chosen with the layer control. Click on a drive band to see summary demographic information.

Table

From the table below note that half of the state, by area, is in the 20-minute hospital desert, home to about 23% of the population or approximately 1,109,000 persons.