A GIS Application for Modeling Accessibility to Health Care Centers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Defining health care accessibility is one of the major tasks that should be covered by health planners. This task can be implemented based on spatial and non-spatial factors. The former takes into account distances to the nearest health centers and provider-to-population ratios. The latter non-spatial factors cover issues such as social class of patients, income and age of health demand. Both factors depend on the use and analysis of spatial data such as the location of health centers, health care catchment areas, and population zones. All of these data can be handled and integrated using a GIS. This chapter presents a GIS based application for defining spatial accessibility to health centers in Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. This application produces three accessibility models: (i) distance to the nearest health centre, (ii) health centre-to-population ratio, and (iii) a combined health care accessibility indicator based on spatial interaction techniques. Each one of these models aggregates the city into accessibility zones. The resulted zones can be used by health planners in deciding whether current health facilities cover the entire city on not. The ArcGIS Spatial Analyst and Network Analyst modules are used in this application. The former is used to produce a raster-based accessibility model for health centers while the latter is used to model health care accessibility using spatial interaction techniques to predict the flow of patients from their residential areas to the nearest health centers.