Revista de Ciencias de la Salud

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Abstracto

Disease and Health Care Geographies: Mapping Trends and Patterns in a GIS

Yorgos N. Photis

Aim and background: Health Geography can provide a spatial understanding of a population's health, the distribution of disease in an area, and the environment's effect on health and disease. It also deals with accessibility to health care and spatial distribution of health care providers and diseases. In order to improve population access to health care it is crucial to monitor how relevant demand, supply and service levels vary across discrete geographical units such as neighborhoods, cities, prefectures, regions even countries and states. In order to improve population access to health care it is crucial to monitor how relevant demand, supply and service levels vary across discrete geographical units such as neighborhoods, cities, prefectures, regions even countries and states. To this end Geographical Information Systems can assist decision makers through the combined processing, analysis and mapping of data from multiple sources. This application of geographical information perspectives, methods and technologies to the study of health, disease, and health care defines a subfield of Urban Geography namely, Medical Geography.

Methodological framework: In this paper, we use Geographic Information Systems to analyze and evaluate the Greek Public Health Care System during the 1997 - 2007 decade. More specifically, health care supply, demand and service location quotients (LQ) were calculated for the fifty-three prefectures of Greece on a yearly basis. Data used to formulate the above quotients were provide by the Hellenic Statistical Service of Greece and refer to total population, number of hospitals, number of hospital beds and number of patients per prefecture.

Results and conclusions: Through the utilization of basic GIS mapping capabilities we to show that with what the technology of GIS offers to the field of health services research, it is possible to create maps and spatial interpretations that are not complex and do not require special data, personnel or systems. Yet, they provide significant insight into the investigation, assessment and improvement of health-related policy and planning issues.