GIS for public health management

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GIS for public health management

M. G. S. M. Zaffar Sadiq
Project Associate

M. Ramalingam
Asst. Professor

L Venugopal
Director, Institute of Remote Sensing,
Anna University, Chennai
zaffar_s17@hotmail.com

Abstract
Public health management needs information on various aspects like the prevalence of diseases, facilities that are available in order to take decisions on either creating infrastructure facilities or for taking immediate action to handle the situation and so on. These decisions need to be taken based on the observations made and available data. As the data relates to Public health covering the whole state and the entire population the data is voluminous, and hence it is extremely difficult to understand the real content. The data needs to be presented in a way that the temporal and spatial nature of the problem can be brought out in a focussed way. Spatial variations in health related data is well known, and its study is a fundamental aspect of epidemiology. Most epidemiological data have a location and time reference. Advanced spatial analysis includes the combination of different data layers. Health authorities, for example, may be interested in the estimates of the number of children in a certain age group that may be exposed to malaria. Climatic and topographic data can be used to determine the range of malaria mosquitoes. This range is unlikely to follow the panchayat union boundaries, but in GIS the two data layers can still be combined to derive the number of children living within the affected areas in a particular panchayat union. In short, the availability of statistical and other information in spatially referenced form and the functions provided by a GIS could allow analyses that were previously too expensive or impossible to perform. Geographic Information System (GIS) is an innovative technology, ideal for generating data suitable for analysis both with respect to space and time.

Introduction
GIS is an integration of computer hardware , software and geographically referenced data. The purpose of using GIS is that maps provide an added dimension to data analysis, which helps in visualizing the complex patterns and relationships. Relationships among neighbouring areas are explicit in maps which allows for the visualization of spatial patterns.

A few typical questions that can be answered by GIS are:

Can we identify areas wherein a particular disease is prevalent?
Can we get some clues about the possible factors that is responsible for a particular disease?
Where to give additional sanctions for facilities and staff?
Where to locate an Primary Health Centre?
Which are the areas wherein water related diseases are prevalent ?
In which area the infant mortality rate is high?
Which are the areas where the birth rate is high?

In short, GIS for Public Health , could be a useful decision support tool in formulating health schemes in a more realistic and need based manner. Even though GIS can be developed for the entire State encompassing all the characteristics of health system, in order to demonstrate GIS as a tool for decision making only small area has been chosen for presentation with only a few components of Health System.

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