Dostępność społeczna warsztatów terapii zajęciowej w Polsce
Social availability of occupational therapy workshops in Poland

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to determine spatial differences in social availability of occupational ther-apy workshops in Poland in 2012 and 2021 and makes an attempt to answer the research questionif there is a correlation between district (poviat) resources of occupational therapy workshops andtheir distribution in Poland. An availability indicator measured by the number of occupational ther-apy workshops per 10,000 persons with disabilities was adopted as the variable for the study. Theresearch was conducted at country, voivodeship and district levels. Use was made of the spatial au-tocorrelation method, which makes it possible to designate the clusters with similar (high or low)values of the investigated phenomenon. It also shows an impact of the neighbourhood and spatialcorrelations occurring between adjacent territorial units (districts). The analysis showed that in theyears 2012–2021 there was an increase in the number of occupational therapy workshops. Duringthis period, 57 new institutions were established, which is 7.8% of their total number. However, therate of this growth was slow and did not exceed 2% in comparison to 5% in the years 2000–2006,and more than 10% in the 1990s. It was also lower than the dynamics of growth in the number ofindividuals benefiting from workshop activities, which amounted to 17% in the investigated period.It has been demonstrated that the distribution of occupational therapy workshops as well as partici-pants of the activities are highly spatially concentrated, which is manifested in the location of about50% of the institutions and the concentration of nearly half of the participants in five voivodeships.Concurrently, in 2021 the largest number of participants per one institution (49 persons) was noted in Podkarpackie (Sub-Carpathia) and Śląskie (Silesia) Voivodeships, whereas the highest increase in the indicator in the investigated years was observed in Podkarpackie and Świętokrzyskie (Kielce)Voivodeships. The social availability indicator of occupational therapy workshops was found to bestrongly spatially diversified, both at voivodeship and district levels. This is evidenced by coefficientsof variation, which exceed 61%. It means that the availability of these institutions is unequal. Theresults show that spatial autocorrelation coefficients of the level of social availability of occupationaltherapy workshops were stable. In the investigated years, the districts with similar access to occupa-tional therapy workshops tended to cluster, and the distribution and range of clusters with high andlow values changed very little.

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