Geographic Information Systems in Global Health
Tanser & Le Sueur (2002) addresses the problem of inequality in global healthcare, whereby Africa’s ecological and physical structure has made the continent a significant contributor to the disease burden in the world. Therefore, there is a need to apply geographical information systems (GIS) in the management and reach of health in Africa. GIS is a tool that can be used to determine environmental factors that facilitate the development of disease-causing pathogens.
Read Also: Healthcare Policy Issues Essay
This can facilitate the collection of real-time data, thus facilitating the taking care of proactive approaches to ensuring health equality across the globe. Additionally, GIS can depict spatially, the distribution of diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS along with the areas. Therefore GIS facilitates the special representation of health data and other factors that affect public health. There is a relationship between disease and space, which can be depicted using GIS.
GIS data can be complemented with other information that is collected through means like surveys and public health databases. Researchers can compare GIS data with data on life expectancy, child mortality, the number of child deaths, and the distribution of malaria (Gapminder, 2021). To complement the special representation of data, I would think health data at the national would be appropriate in the accurate representation of health data.
GIS Essay References
- Gapminder. (2021). GD005 | Gapminder. Gapminder.org. Retrieved 14 November 2021.
- Tanser, F. C., & Le Sueur, D. (2002). The application of geographical information systems to important public health problems in Africa. International journal of health geographics, 1(1), 1-9.
