Hospital Location Allocation in Murshidabad District by GIS-Based MCA and Analytical Hierarchy Process

Hospitals are one of the most important infrastructural objects. The increasing population, especially in developing countries, amplifies the demand for new hospitals. Identifying the best locations for new hospitals is an important issue due to the fact that selecting suitable locations will help the government to optimize the allocation of medical resources, simplify social contradictions and control the health care development in rural and urban areas.

The district Murshidabad is situated in the bank of Padma and Bhagirathi River. Only 135 primary health centers are there, which provide very basic health services and they are randomly located in the district. No emergency health supporting facilities are present in those health centers and some of them are not opened for 24 hours in a day. Even the block primary health center is also very poor to take admissions of serious patients. Most of the times these health centers ask patient-parties to shift the patient Murshidabad medical college hospital. This is a very tuff job for emergency patients. Sometimes, patient-parties fail to shift the patient to a good hospital for very limited ambulance facility.

To solve the problem, it is very necessary to establish new hospitals or improve the services provided by the existing health centers. And as hospitals are one of the most important health services needed for the whole society, so they must be located in a rational manner so that we can maximize the accessibility of healthcare.

In this paper, we built site suitability analysis for selecting the optimal site for building new hospitals based on using MCA, AHP and Pair wise comparison method.GIS tool and techniques are employed to analyze the list of identified criteria in hospital site selection. These criterion are Population density, Distance from existing health centers, Proximity to road, Distance from railway track, Distance from river, Distance from industrial zones, Proximity to settlement, Proximity to educational institutions, Proximity to rail stations.

The results shows that though suitable areas are scattered over the entire region but most of the suitable areas are situated in the northern part of Murshidabad as national highway and
railway enhance the accessibility of the region. And also the result shows that the southern
part some area is very unsuitable for building new hospital. And it is also true that some
existing hospitals were not built in the suitable place.