Community Health Care Unit Essay

In many of the developing countries Community Health Care units (CHC) are considered to be the referral units to primary health care. The location of CHC facilities plays a vital role in making them more accessible especially in rural areas. Location of these health care units affects the spatial accessibility and influences the ease of availing services. Maximum Covering Location Problems (MCLP) were used in planning the location of these facilities without taking into account the population distribution over the space which leads to non-uniformity in catering the services. In this study the obstacles in the conventional methods are overcome by developing a methodology. It is observed that existing community health care units are inefficient
As re-locating the current CHC’s is not economically viable, a feasible solution that enhances the spatial accessibility and the utilization levels is suggested. For quantifying the present and enhanced spatial accessibility, Two-step floating catchment area is used in this study. As a case study, health care units of Jhunjhunu district in Rajasthan are considered and an optimal solution is drawn.
Keywords: Community health care, Maximum Covering Location Problems, Two-step floating catchment Method.
Introduction:
In developing nations, Health care framework consists of three units such as Community health care units, Primary health care units and Sub centers [1].Community health center are considered to be the bulwark of health care systems [2]. These services units must be provided ideally as it is impractical to allot an individual CHC to each and every habitats available on account of constrained resources. Numerous past studies on location allocation of services utilized MCLP in determining the locations. [3].As most of the
This lead to non-uniformity in the distribution of health care units. As the population in Rajasthan is heterogeneously distributed over the space, executing by using the conventional algorithms would yield, non-uniformity in the locations of health care units. Therefore, the need of hour is to develop a new methodology that can enhance the spatial accessibility to health care units. As recommending additional outlays would not be economically feasible, to enlighten the effectiveness of this methodology the analysis is carried out, with an assumption of re-allotting the existing resources, so as to find the maximum accessibility that could have achieved with the existing facilities. It is observed that, locations explored by implementing Part to Whole methodology, are easily accessible which reflects the elevation in the spatial accessibility to health