It is conventional, and useful, to divide
the geography of health into two broad areas: the
geography of disease and ill-health; and the
geography of health care. In the first, interest is in
describing, exploring, and perhaps modelling, the
spatial incidence of disease or illness. Important
questions that arise here concern whether there is
evidence for ‘clustering’ of disease, or whether there
are areas that have unusual ‘clusters’ of health events. Some studies go beyond this in the search for
causal explanations by seeing if there is an
association between the spatial patterning of disease
and environmental contamination. The second
broad area of research is concerned with the delivery
of, and access to, health services. Clearly, health care
resources have to be located somewhere. But what
are the population ‘needs’ for health care, how
should resources be allocated over space, and how
accessible are such resources to the populations they
are designed to serve? These are very important
issues for the planning of any health care system,
and this section reviews case studies that have used
GIS to help such planning and evaluation.