Land Suitability Assessment for Construction of a Hospital: An Integrated Modeling Approach based on MCDM and GIS (A Case Study: The Second District of Tehran)

Determining the optimal location for the construction of the hospital will increase citizens' satisfaction with health services and increase their quality of life. The aim of the present study is to determine the optimal location for the construction of a hospital in the second district of Tehran’s metropolis. For this purpose, an integrated methodology including GIS, SWARA weighting method, and COPRAS ranking method has been presented. SWARA and COPRAS multi-criteria decision-making methods are among the best methods and have received less attention in the field of determining the optimal location of the hospital in combination with the GIS. The results of the weighting method showed that the criteria of distance to existing hospitals and the geospatial distribution of PM2.5 particles are the most and least important criteria in the decision-making process of the optimal location of the hospital, respectively. The results of geospatial modeling showed that the southwestern parts of the district have a very high potential for hospital construction and almost 48% of the region has the potential to build a hospital. In other words, there is no spatial justice for the citizens of half of the region in using the medical services of the hospitals. The results of ranking candidate sites showed that sites 5 and 6 were the most suitable places to build a new hospital in the second district. According to the research results, the weighting method used has the same accuracy as the fashionable weighting method of the analytic hierarchical process, despite the executive and computational complexity.