SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF PHC FACILITIES IN RELATION TO STAFFING CAPACITY USING GEO-SPATIAL TECHNIQUES IN GOMBE LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF GOMBE STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Health care is one of the most important facility and it helps to improve the quality of life. This study assess accessibility to primary health care facilities in Kwami LGAs using Geospatial Techniques. Location, number, staffs road data and coordinates of all the PHCs in Kwami LGAs, along with maps and data on the population was obtained at the various LGA PHC Department. The data was used for analysis of access, whereas information obtained at PHC department of the respective LGA Provides attribute information used as an inventory in creation and population of geodatabase. The network Analysis function in ArcGIS 10.1 was utilized to create an origin-destination (OD) cost matrix by integrating Road network files in to the software. The result shows that are 11 political wards and a total of 39 PHC in Kwami LGA. The spatial distribution of PHC facilities in the study area shows that 72% of the wards have atleast one PHC center or and Health Post, with 64% having atleast one Health Clinic. All health clinics in kwami didn’t met the Criteria for minimum standard of staff set by NPHCDA. Only 23.5% of the Health Posts in Kwami i.e 4 out of 17 Health Posts met the Criteria. According to NPHCDA there should be one PHC center per ward, one Health clinics per neighbourhoods of 2000 persons and one Health Posts for neighbourhood of 500 people.  Based on the 2014 projected population of 2006 of the wards inn Kwami LGA the minimum population of a ward is 6000 people this shows that all the wards should have one PHC center atleast 3 Health Clinics and 12 Health Posts. This is not what is obtainable in the study area. Comprehensive measures should be considered to provide more PHC to alleviate the unequal spatial access to health services.