This week we talked about the uses of GIS in health geography. There are four major areas where GIS is used, which reflect the major ideas of health geography that we talked about last week. The four areas of application are spatial epidemiology, environmental hazards, modelling health services, and identifying health inequalities. The first major application, spatial epidemiology, is using GIS to understand spatial variations in health geography. Statistical measures are useful in learning about trends and mapping variations, but everything still depends on having good, up-to-date data which is usually not the case. The second application is environmental hazards, which can both map hazards and to prevent/mitigate future problems. The third and fourth applications, modelling health services and identifying health inequalities, are interrelated. Because mapping access to health services can usually expose inequality between different groups of people.

We also focused on the topic of epidemiology, which is “the study of the distribution and determinants of health and disease-related states in populations, and the application of this study to control health problems (lecture notes).” There is also a difference between health and disease. Health is more general and describes overall well-being, while disease requires a definition of some sort of debilitation. There are different ways of quantifying disease such new cases versus total cases, and the best way will usually depend on what the objective is. Finally, there are a variety of methods of displaying data, including smoothing which can help reduce irregularities and better visualize patterns, and standardization which can help make different areas more comparable.