The Primary Health Care (PHC) is the first point of contact within a country’s health care system. The PHC services are fundamental for the population’s health and welfare. PHC aims to promote the overall health status of a community, prevent diseases or early diagnose them and manage patients with chronic diseases. Among its core principles involvement of community and equality of access are included. Spatial Epidemiology: It is considered to be a subfield of health geography that focuses on the study of spatial distribution of several health outcomes. It is closely involves the description and examination of disease and its geographic and temporal variations, while in considers all types of factors that may affect health outcomes in real life (e.g. demographic, environmental, behavioral, socioeconomic, genetic, and infections risk factors).
Published in Chapter:
Geospatial and Spatio-Temporal Analysis in Health Research: GIS in Health
Dimitra I. Sifaki-Pistolla (University of Crete, Greece), Georgia D. Pistolla (University of Crete, Greece), Vasiliki-Eirini Chatzea (University of Crete, Greece), and Nikolaos Tzanakis (University of Crete, Greece)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0937-0.ch019
Abstract
This chapter identifies the need for GIS and geospatial applications in health research. Spatial epidemiology (or geo-epidemiology) and geo-medicine are two rapidly growing fields in medical research and epidemiology. They could offer tremendous potential to the healthcare industry, health researchers and students, as well as the community in general. Their main advantage is the wide range of methodologies that they utilize in order to study health outcomes and incidences in three or four dimensions (2 or 3D space and 1D time). Therefore, this chapter also introduces selected GIS applications with a special focus on epidemiology and public health. Furthermore, in this chapter we will critically appraise the most frequently used tests and spatio-temporal methodologies in the literature and discuss the future emerging trends and research opportunities that arising.