Application of GIS in health care facilities planning
Abdul Kader A. Murad
Department of Urban & Regional Planning, Faculty of Environmental Design
P.O.Box 80210, Jeddah-21589, Saudi Arabia
amurad25@hotmail.com
Health care facilities planing is one of the planning fields that uses
spatial data in its resources allocation process. Health authorities and
officers have been required to keep registers and carry out analysis of
costs, benefits and health needs. This is quite a complex procedure as the
information needed by the health authorities is extremely varied. Today,
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provide useful techniques
regarding capturing, maintaining and analyzing the spatial data. The aim
of this research is to identify the ways in which GIS can be applied to
help planners in planning and monitoring the location of Health care
facilities.
Healthcare Planning and GIS
One of the basic objectives of healthcare Planning in any part of
the world is to have an equal access to health care for all, it respective of
ability to pay. This means that every residence should have equal chance
to go to clinics and hospitals. To meet this objective and other ones,
health authorities are required to make careful analysis about the real
demand and supply of health care facilities at their areas. These analysis
and studies can be grouped into three main areas, which are a) spatial
changes in health status, b) spatial epidemiology, and c) health care
facilities accessibility and utilization. Each one of these topics has a
spatial dimension, which means that GIS can be used for their studies.
The next part will describe more about each group and illustrate the
possible uses of GIS is them.
Spatial Changes in Health Status
One of the facts about health status in a micro/macro scale is that it
changes across the space. Health authorities always investigate and
analysis the health status at their areas and make sure that health needs
satisfied.
Locality definition is considered as an important issue for health
care facilities planning studies. The idea here is to determine the socio-
economic classification for the area surrounding certain health facilities
and then relating the local profiles of such an area with the health care
needs. Once the socio-economic status of any location is defined, then
GIS can be used to map and tabulate the distribution of such status. A
good example of using GIS for linking social profiles with health needs
is found by Hirschfield et al., 1995, which have produced patient profiles
for an every health facility catchment area. Such studies usually involve
matching point-referenced, post coded health data with area
socioeconomic data, particularly deprivation indicators (Gatrell and
Senior, 1999).
For example, Health status can be viewed through comparing the
actual number of moralities in an area with the national average, taking
into account age and sex variations in the area concerned (Birkin et al.,
1996). Here GIS can be used successfully for describing spatial variation
of mortality at parts of any country. Once the mortality rate of each
region is entered into the GIS, then the mapping and analysis tools of
GIS can be applied to present out the regions that have high rates of
mortality. The regions with high rates require more attention from health
authorities in order to improve their existing health status. In addition to
mortality, there is much other health status indicators that are used by
health authorities, such as fertility rates, which help them to assess and
monitor the required health services.
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