GIS Modelling for Health Reform in Rural Governorate of Egypt

Introduction
Sohag governorate one of rural areas in Egypt. It located in the Upper Egypt to the south of Cairo with distance about 476 km, It consists of 11 districts, 10 cities, 270 villages and 1217 kafers & Nagaas. It occupies area about 2256 km 2 . Sohag governorate is considered the second most populous governorate in Upper Egypt with an estimated population of 3.4 million in year 2000 (Fig. 1). The population growth rate was estimated to be 2.6% in 1999 and 2.5% in 2000 so, the population will reach 4.4 million by year 2010 . The age distributions of Sohag governorate through year 1996, and 2001 indicates that Sohag has youth age structure distributions because the age period from 15 to 64 represents 53.7% and the age period of (0-14) and (+65) represent 46.3%.

The rate of unemployment according to CAPMAS census in year 2000 to 8.5%. It is still high with respect to the national rate,


There are strong relation between distribution of different types of diseases, and the standard of living. Figure 2 shows the distribution of poverty along Sohag governorate .

The objective of good health itself is really has two fold: the best attainable average level - goodness - and the smallest feasible differences among individuals and groups - fairness. To realize the objectives of the health systems and health reform principles, it must deal with geographical information system (GIS).

Material and Methods
The present work deals with the future health reform (on the primary health care level). The main objectives of the health reform are identify the main areas of potential primary health care gain and review the existing situation of the different health services against planning standards guidelines. To achieve these targets the GIS mathematical Model is used. The spatial and attribute data were collected from the field surveys, CAPMAS and Sohag Health Authority. The different infrastructures and landmarks are digitized from topographic maps of scale 1:25000 using Arc/Info and converted to rectified digital map. These maps include several spatial data e.g. urban areas, roads, railway, high electric power lines, drains, canals, Nile Valley, villages and districts boundaries. The health facilities over all the governorate are surveyed and located using the Global Positioning System (GPS) (Fig. 3).

The designed program and ArcView software package are used to analyze and processed the data as well as creation of the thematic maps.

The mathematical GIS model was applied to determine serviced and unserviced areas by health facilities. This model was implemented through the construction of program by the author using Visual Basic and ArcView software. The program parameters are PHC unit’s power (20000 population) and the serviced distance of radius 2.5 km . the Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW). Which is the simplest interpolation method. A neighborhood about the distributed point is identified and a weighted average is taken of the observation values within this neighborhood. The weights are a decreasing function of distance. The user has control over the mathematical form of the weighting function, the size of the neighborhood (expressed as a radius or a number of points), in addition to other options.

Then, after calculations the received service from each PHC unit to each urban area within 2.5 km distance, every received services to each urban area were collected and compared with the total population of this urban area (Fig. 4 ).


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