Health Promotion Board (HPB) is established to promote Singapore national health in Singapore. It looks after the entire population, making sure that health care is available to Singapore citizens when they are in need. One objective of HPB’s is to make health care facilities accessible to everyone and analyze the accessibility of these facilities to Singapore population.
We aim to demonstrate the distribution of health care facilities in Singapore and determine the accessibility of each facility. We will visualize the distribution of facilities using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and further zoom in to look at individual region and facility.
HPB personnel excel at analyzing Singapore citizens' health conditions based on comprehensive data. However, they are unable to manipulate the data and visualize it in chart or map which would help them understand the results clearly and easily. Nonetheless, HPB personnel know all the health issues the best and they are the only ones who can properly analyze and define the accessibility given their years of experience with the industry.
Thus, in order to better utilize their understanding of the issue and produce more accurate definition precision, advanced tools that require minimal learning must be provided to HPB so that the staff can spend time doing what they do the best. At the same time, the tools must be able to provide users with necessary functions and views so that further tasks can be performed.
We aim to demonstrate the distribution of health care agencies of HPB and determine the accessibility of each agency. We will visualize the distribution of facilities using Geographical Information Systems(GIS) and then further zoom in to look at individual region and facility.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and Point Pattern Analysis (PPA) techniques are chosen to further determine the accessibility of different types of healthcare facilities in Singapore.
By mapping healthcare facilities and residential areas, we can visualize the distribution of facilities in the areas. However, we might not be able to come up with any significant conclusion by looking at the distribution and that is where PPA can be helpful.
PPA techniques are a group of quantitative methods that describe the pattern of point (or event) locations and determine if point locations are concentrated (or clustered) within a defined region of study (Joseph Wartman and Nicholas E. Malasavage, 2010).
Three general PPA techniques will be utilized to perform analysis in this project. They are density-based method, distance-based method and the local indicator of spatial association (LISA) based method. Application of these methods in GIS sets a solid ground for further interpretation to be drawn upon. A straightforward visual representation allows the team to gain important meaning from the PPA results. Each of the technique will be individually assessed and the results will be cross compared so that the interpretation can be accurate. This needs to be done because different technique has different focus in analyzing the issue and thus produces distinct results.
A thematic map web app will be built with the following features:
- Enable users to select certain type of facilities to visualize distribution
- Enable users to select certain region to visualize the distribution of facilities
- Enable users without technical skills to upload new health care facilities
Along with aim of building a nation of healthy people, Health Promotion Board can utilize this tool as the medium to measure how accessible health care facilities are to Singapore citizens. This will be the starting point of a series of initiatives carried out by HPB, targeting at the regions that are considered “lacking” health facilities. This project is the enabler of the understanding of the entire facility accessibility issue.
| Possible Avenues for Extension of the Project Scope
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- Ability to connect real time facility distribution database
- Ability to connect real time population distribution database
- Ability to reuse the project for other countries
- Ability to configure the dashboard to cater to other industries
