Abstract: Access to healthcare facilities is often impacted by the time required to reach the facility, which is a factor of geographic distance and road characteristics. Arriving to a critical care hospital on time can be a matter of lifesaving. On the other hand, longer time to reach primary care physician office can discourage seeking the service which may deter the basic health care. Accordingly, people that requiring longer time to reach to the nearest healthcare facility have lower socio-economic-status (SES) than people requiring shorter time.
Identifying locations for potential healthcare facilities for optimum use.
In order to cover these issues, ArcGIS software is used for creating a geo-database for health services in Jeddah and for covering the above issues. ArcGIS network analyst and overlay analysis were used for producing the paper analysis results.
Bio: Prof. Abdulkader A. Murad is a Fellow at the Charted Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors, FCInstCES. Currently, he is the GIS Advisor for the Vice President for projects in King Abdulaziz University and a Professor of GIS in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at King Abdulaziz University. Previous to this, he was Vice Dean for research at the faculty of Environmental Design and the Chairman of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. His research interests are in the domain of GIS applications in retail and healthcare planning. He received his PhD in GIS from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK.