Benchmarking the location of health centers at Jeddah city: a GIS approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss a GIS application created for health care planning at Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. The application covers important health care facilities planning issues including defining accessibility to health care facilities, identifying and classifying the distribution of health demand at Jeddah city and modeling spatial variation of patient locations. Design/methodology/approach – In order to build this application, a geo‐database is created that covers points, lines and polygon features such as health care facility location, road network and population districts. In addition, raster surface models are produced using Kriging function which produces raster surfaces for predicting health demand values at the study area. Findings – The outputs of this application can be used to help health care planners in evaluating the existing location of health care facilities and see if these locations are concentrated at certain city districts. In addition, local health planners can use the created models when deciding where to allocate a new health care facility at Jeddah city. Originality/value – This application is considered as a spatial decision support system for health planners in Jeddah city. It can be used to define and evaluate location of health centers as well as to identify the spatial accessibility to health centers.