GIS 1 Lab 5: Mini-Final Project

For my final project I decided to find an ideal place for a new hospital in Eau Claire County Wisconsin. There are currently three hospitals in the county but they are in the northwestern part of the county in and around the city of Eau Claire. The people in that part of the county are within range of immediate medical help if they need it but what about the people in the rest of the county? I came up with four criteria that would help me place the new hospital in a place that makes sense and offers better medical help to a larger area of the county. My four criteria were: The new hospital is not within 25 miles of an existing one, it has to be within 2 miles of a major road, not in the county forest land, and within one mile of three schools. This project is not just for me. I think that this is a possible concern that could be considered by the county. This isn't a hard proposal to understand I think that most audiences would be able to see why this is a possible concern that maybe should be considered. Obviously there are many more criteria that would have to be discussed and met other than the four that I came up with, but my criteria could be a start to a real project like this that a county or city might have to consider.

I got this data from ESRI and the UW-Eau Claire GIS database. In order to do this project I needed quite a few different kinds of data. The data sets I used were: USA counties, USA hospitals, USA schools, USA major roads, and USA county forest. I didn't have too many concerns when it came to the data for this project however there were a few things I considered. Things have changed since this data was published and because things are always changing some of the data may be missing or not exist anymore. Consider the school data for example, new schools are added and some are closed so the exact and accurate number of schools may be different now than when the data was published. The coordinate system of the data is always a concern as well, making sure it’s in a suitable system for the project is important that is why I used a state based coordinate system.

Once I had my question, criteria and data sets it was time to start answering my question. I did this through the use of 4 major tools. The tools were buffer, erase, dissolve and intersect. I started out with my four data sets and began to use these tools on each one to get my desired location. The first set was my hospital data, this shows the existing hospitals in Eau Claire county. I wanted mine to be at least 25 miles from an existing one so I applied a 25 mile buffer to that data set and then erased the area inside that 25 mile buffer so that it is not available for the new location. The next part was to take my major roads and perform a buffer on this data as well. I did a 2 mile buffer from the roads and that gave me the suitable locations for the new hospital within 2 miles of a major road. Then I had to make sure the new location isn't in county forest so I did an erase on that data which makes sure that the only suitable area is not in county forest land. I wanted the hospital to be within a mile of three schools, because a lot of injuries happen at schools so easy access to aid is a must. There usually are more populated areas around schools as well. Finding an area that is within a mile of 3 schools really narrowed down my possible new locations which was helpful in determining the final place. I ran a one mile buffer on the schools data and then I found one area where the buffers from 3 schools overlapped which makes that a suitable spot for the hospital. Once I had run these tools on the data to start narrowing down my options for places I ran an intersect tool. The intersect tool allowed me to bring all the new layers I created together into one map. I made sure I intersected them in the right order so that I had the areas outside 25 miles, within 2 miles of a road, outside the county forest and within one mile of three schools. Once I had them all together I ran a dissolve. The dissolve cleans up the areas in the buffers where the roads intersect and things like that were. I was only interested in the Eau Claire County area of all this data so I ran a clip which then will only display the data that falls inside Eau Claire County. Below is my data flow model showing all the steps I just described above.

Data Flow Model

In my project the four criteria worked out very well and gave me only one possible place for my new hospital location. If I had not had the forth criteria of, within one mile of three schools, the possible areas would have been much larger and there would have been many more of them. The ideal location for a new hospital according to my model is in the southeastern section of the county. This is the part of the county I thought the hospital should be in when I first thought about this project, so it worked out well.

New Hospital Location Map Four Criteria

1. Not within 25 miles of existing hospital.

2. Within 2 miles of a major road

3. Not in county forest

4. Within one mile of three schools.

Overall I thought this project went very well. If I were asked to do the project again I think I would, but I would try to make it more realistic. My criteria were a good start, but there are many other factors that I didn't look at like population density and other census data that would be very important in a real project like this. I think the biggest challenge I had was coming up with criteria for the project. I knew where I thought the best place would be before I started the project and getting criteria that made sense to place the new location in that general area was somewhat challenging. I liked coming up with my own problem to solve even if it isn’t really an actual situation. It is very cool to see the power that these programs have and how much they can help when considering a question like the one I posed.

Sources:
ESRI data from the UW-Eau Claire GIS server
ArcMap 10.2