Population demographic change will impact the organisation and delivery of a range of population services. This is especially the case in more peripheral, rural regions where it will become more difficult to maintain the social and technical infrastructure required by a declining and older population. Particularly, in East-German rural regions it is already difficult to fill health service vacancies, especially in the case of general practitioners. In this paper a GIS was used to determine the current and likely future accessibility of general practitioners in the rural county of Uecker-Randow in the federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The average car travel time between the places of residence and the nearest surgery could rise from 6.7 minutes in 2008 to 9.6 minutes in 2020 under a worst-case scenario where surgeries remaining vacant after retirement. At present 76% of the population statistically reach the nearest general practitioner in less than 4 minutes, falling to 68.7% in 2020, and just 8.5% of inhabitants need 8 minutes and longer (2020: 21.1%). The use of GIS in the work has highlighted spatial disparities and helped to identify regions in urgent need of action to assure acceptable access to medical infrastructure.