The density of medical care facilities and service providers in rural areas is low. Hence, distances to be overcome can be large. However, the inhabitants of peripheral areas are often older, have a higher morbidity risk and a greater need for medical care. In addition, mobility restrictions increase with age. Although motorised individual transport dominates in rural areas, accessibility by local public transport is also important, because older people in particular are less likely to own a car. The aim of this study was to investigate the accessibility of GPs (general practitioners and GP internists), ophthalmologists, specialist internists and urologists in the district of Vorpommern-Greifswald as well as to analyse how many inhabitants are affected by good and bad accessibility and whether a longer journey time by car and public transport has an influence on the use of GPs and gynecologists in Vorpommern. The accessibility analyses for these projects were performed in a Geographic Information System (GIS) using network analyses on the basis of digital routable road data with the software ESRI ArcGIS 10. 0 Esri Inc., Redlands/California (USA). For public transport accessibility, an aditionally model used. It reads the timetables of the regional transport companies on the basis of the Dijkstra algorithm and calculates routes to the nearest medical service providers. Differences between the doctor groups were determined with the Kruskal-Wallis test. The utilisation data was ...