GIS in Health and Social Care Planning

The application of GIS and GI science approaches within health and social care has been an established area for research for over twenty years. The chapter identifies core theoretical concerns with topics such as: supply, demand, need and choice in health care, and examines some of the ways in which these notions have been modeled quantitatively in applied settings. In addition, summaries are provided of previous research in the sub-themes of accessibility & utilization, health inequalities, location-allocation modeling, epidemiology, service planning and health informatics. The second part of the chapter examines three research case studies carried out by the authors in the UK and Ireland around the areas of: a) cross-border hospital accessibility, b) geographically-weighted regression modeling of illness data and, c) the planning of social care services. The final section identifies some future directions for work under the wider headings of spatial data, analysis and visualization