Hospital Site Selection in Iskandar Malaysia using GIS-Multi Criteria Analysis

Hospital is one of the most important and beneficial public services in the world, therefore, these facilities should be located in a rational manner. Increasing the population of countries particularly developing countries and remote areas leads to the demand for new public health facilities and hospitals. No matter who provides the healthcare facilities, the most important issue is where to locate a new hospital to provide, both facility location and attractiveness. Hospital proper site selection has a vital role in hospital construction and management. From the aspect of the government and healthcare organization, appropriate hospital site selection will help optimize the allocation of medical resources, matching the provision of health care with the social and economic demands. From the aspect of the investors and operators of the hospital, optimum hospital site selection will definitely be cost-saving on capital strategy. On the other hand, establishing a hospital in urban districts has its own positive and negative consequences. The positive impacts of establishing a hospital in an area are that it increases property value in the neighboring periphery as well as improving healthrelated accessibility for the residents of that urban district. The negative impacts of establishing a hospital in an area are negative side-effects such as environmental contamination and inducing new waves of traffic flow. Then, the adjacent community is impacted by forms of increased traffic flow, increased emergency vehicle usage in residential areas. Therefore, in hospital site selection should be tried to reduce the negative impacts. Then, main aim of this paper is to select a site for the building of a new hospital in Iskandar Malaysia using GIS-based Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) with consideration of various factor criteria, and constraint criteria in order to balance the medical resource there.