Jacqueline Young

Spatial analysis is an important tool for advancing decision-making pertaining to policy, planning, location and service analysis. Decision problems in the field of public health may involve the planning of new locations, routing and prioritizing for service allocation. Community Health Centres (CHCs) strive to make health care accessible to everyone by increasing awareness of social determinants of health such as employment, education and poverty. An important task of CHCs is to prioritize neighbourhoods based on local health indicators to address the questions of who is in need, where they are located and what services are required. A spatial decision support system (SDSS) and a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) method, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), is demonstrated in a community-based research setting. Determinants of health are input into the AHP to create a composite index for prioritizing neighbourhoods that have high proportions of recent immigrants and ethnic populations. The primary research objective is to demonstrate how interactive map-based SDSSs can be incorporated into research at a CHC. A focus group was held to discuss the uses of SDSSs and to understand during what stage of the decision making process they can be involved with. Furthermore, the standardization step of the AHP was analyzed to determine the effect of standardization of indicators in a composite index. The results of two transformations were compared: the score range procedure; and the maximum score procedure. Overall, the results of the focus group indicate that SDSSs and mapping can become important tools in the decision making process at a CHC. The testing of the two standardization transformations resulted in different prioritizations. However, the rankings were reasonably similar and could be combined into an overall list of priority neighbourhoods.