USING GIS FOR DEFINING THE ACCESSIBILITY TO HEALTH CARE FACILITIES IN JEDDAH CITY

Health care facilities planning 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 for capturing, maintaining and analyzing health care spatial data. Health geoinformatics is an emerging discipline that uses innovative scientific and geospatial technology to investigate health issues. Evaluating the accessibility of existing health facilities is one of the tasks that can be covered using GIS by health authorities. Here the health planners determine the areas, which have poor accessibility for certain health facility and then prepare proposals for improving such low level of health care accessibility. The purpose of this paper is to define how GIS can be used for defining the level of accessibility to health care facilities in Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. The first part of the paper covers recent worldwide examples of GIS based accessibility studies and identifies the advantages of using GIS in health care planning field. The second part of the paper focuses on the created GIS application for health care facilities in Jeddah city. A geadatabase is created for this application that includes location of health services, road network, health demand, and population districts. ArcGIS software is used to build this geodatabase that covers all of the collected data of this application. Several issues are covered in this application including defining the spatial distribution of health care facilities, evaluating health demand types and modeling health service areas based on drive time analysis and straight-line allocation technique. In order to cover these issues, GIS analysis functions and tools such as feature classification, overlay analysis, and network analysis are used for producing the outputs of the presented application.