Location Allocation of Health Care Centers Using Geographical Information System: region 11 of Tehran

Location allocation of healthcare centers facilitates the accessibility of health services and the lack of proper distribution of these centers leads to increasing problems of citizen's access to these centers. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the distribution of healthcare centers in the region of the study and to determine deprived areas from this services. This research is a case study that has been done on region 11 of Tehran. The data were collected form maps and they have been analyzed by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) in GIS environment. There are 10 hospitals in the study area that include seven percentage of all hospitals in Tehran. In the evaluation of the information layers, the layers of the residential and the industrial centers were respectively weighted %19(maximum weight) and %1(minimum weight). After the compatibility analysis, the rate of incompatibility of different lands with treatment land was four percentage. This study showed overlapping services of existing hospitals by determining service radius of 1500 m. In addition, with combining information layers on the final map, suitable areas for optimal placement of health centers were identified. The results of this study showed that current locations of medical centers in region11 of Tehran do not match with scientific standards.