Week 1 summary
In this week we have discussed the topic Geohealth as a combination of Health Care Geography and Spatial Epidemiology.
We have taken the GIS system apart and identified the components of Data, Software, Mapping, Analysis and People.
Week 1 summary
In this week we have discussed the topic Geohealth as a combination of Health Care Geography and Spatial Epidemiology.
We have taken the GIS system apart and identified the components of Data, Software, Mapping, Analysis and People. Each of these components plays an important role in the Geohealth application.
We have seen how data splits into “Primary Data”, in this case health related data, and “Secondary data” (environmental data or administrative data). We looked at ways to geo-reference data and identified several future trends (big data).
For software we identified many different types of software with specific functionality ranging from database software, GIS software, statistical software to modelling software. This software can be either commercial or open source.
We have seen that we are using different map types in our work. Sometimes a point map is the most obvious choice. But other types of maps have also been presented like the choropleth map, allocation maps and animations.
For the analysis part we have seen that we can split this group into cluster analysis, correlations studies that link disease to environmental factors and diffusion studies when we focus on spatial epidemiology but for health care geography we can split into accessibility studies and planning health facilities.
The People involved in a GIS system can be divided into the producers of information and the consumers. Producers come from the health and GIScience domain, but the consumers are mainly Government, policy makers and the general public.
You also completed your first in depth topic on health facility planning, accessibility and GIS. The topic covered a number of elements. It started explaining that we can view health services delivery as a prob