Abstract:
Pathumthani province has developed the existing 79 health stations, 4 municipal health service centers and 7 district hospital to 90 PCUs in order to thoroughly serve 550 villages. At present, the PCUs are responsible only for their own service areas that are divided by the local administration (subdistrict and municipality) boundary. The allocation of PCUs has not previously been evaluated for the appropriateness of their service areas.Therefore, the main objectives of this research are to evaluate the appropriateness of the PCU service areas regarding to the public accessibility to use the service and the number of people for each PCU. In addition, this research had also applied geoinformatics technology as an analytical tool. According to the standard of the National Health Security Office's requirement, three conditions were applied for the evaluation: 1) traveling time to PCU is less than 30 minutes, 2) distance to PCU is less than 25 kilometers, and 3) each PCU is responsible for not more than 10,000 people. The population number of the 550 villages (obtained from the Provincial Office of Public Health), the speed rate (km/hour) of the trip (from field data collection), and the distance between one of the villages to all PCUs (obtained from ArcGIS software) were collected for analysis.The study result shows that all of the existing PCu service areas are in an agreement with the standard of the traveling time and the distance, but there are 21 PCus that are responsible for more than 10,000 people. In order to distribute the population evenly, 37 villages of the 21 PCUs are required to use another less-crowded and nearby PCUs. After adjusting the population, two of the 21 PCUs are still over-populated because there are three villages unable to move to other PCUs due to a distance of over 25 kilometers. It can be concluded that the existing locations of the 90 PCUs are acceptable in the aspect of the public accessibility and no need to change the service areas but the facilities of PUCs need to be improved in order to serve a population of over 10,000. This study also found that geoinformatics technology has proved to be an efficient time-and cost-saving tool.