Final project: trying to find the best location to set an emergency medical center in 5 nj counties

[MarcWilson]

For my final project, I wanted to identify potential sites (locations) for setting up emergency medical centers in the suburbs of 5 New Jersey Counties. The purpose of my project is to address the problem of rapid responses to reliable emergency health services in the outer suburban areas in new jersey and present an evaluation of ex-urban areas with the focus on identifying areas that are ideal establishing a group of privately owned ex-urban medical emergency response centers. The first step of my method is/was finding a general location for each county. I used google earth. The counties I chose were camden, middlesex, mercer, Hunterdon and Somerset. For this question I will use camden county  (which is attached here) as an example, and the location will be in sicklerville township. I'm not too sure what method(s) to use once I found the location and/or what data to look for. Would georeferencing be good method? I have a trial version of ArcGIS 10.2.2. I've read somewhere about using arcgis spatial analyst in order to find if a location is suitable (theres a tutorial that comes with it) but I can't find the program on my desktop (I saw it as an extension on arcmap). I tried looking for data from this site: TIGER/Line® - Geography - U.S. Census Bureau and was able to download a zip of the us counties. Really wanna know what steps I should take

Help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

[SepheFox]

Marc, spatial analyst is an extension or set of tools within ArcGIS, not a separate program. It is mostly for use with raster files, and probably not applicable for your project.  What you are doing is called a site suitability analysis. First, you are going to need to identify the criteria that makes a site more or less suitable. No one else can really do that for you. Some ideas though, would be: far from another medical facility, large population of elderly or children, that kind of thing. Try researching the subject some. After you establish criteria, you need to gather the data layers that show the criteria. ie. demographics, current hospital locations, etc.

Those two tasks should keep you busy for a while, then if you need help with a specific GIS task, you can probably get it here.

[SepheFox]

Oh, and georeferencing is also not applicable to what you're doing. It means to orient a piece of spatial data to a specific coordinate system. Try googling it for more information.

[EricJohnson2]

Marc, I would start by analyzing some census data (census.gov), looking at demographic and age data as Sephe said earlier.  I think you would also want to analyze population data as well being that your site selection would be dependent upon people.  Census has downloads by county on there website.

[ChrisDonohue__GISP]

Sephe's suggestion of doing a Suitability Analysis is probably the best way to go.

Another idea - If the primary access to these Emergency Health Services locations will be by driving, one potential analysis you could do would be to use the Network Analyst Extension to determine how accessible services would be by road.  You could do a Location-Allocation analysis.

Network Analyst - Location/Allocation - See "Example 1:  Locating an ERS center"

ArcGIS Help (10.2, 10.2.1, and 10.2.2)

Network Analyst

ArcGIS Help (10.2, 10.2.1, and 10.2.2)

Network Analyst Tutorial

ArcGIS Help (10.2, 10.2.1, and 10.2.2)

Caveats/Considerations:  You will need to have a copy of Network Analyst.  Second you will need a good road layer that is set up for Network Analysis.  While road layers are fairly easily acquired, getting one that is clean and easily converted into a Network Dataset so it can be run in Network Analyst can be more problematic.  It can be a nightmare to try to clean up a road network - many road layers look great visually but have very small disconnects that cause the Network analysis to go awry.  Lastly, learning Network Analyst can take some time, as it is a bit different than other aspects of GIS, so take that into consideration if you haven't used it before.  Don't get me wrong - Network Analyst can be very powerful; but the level of effort required to get to the analysis stage can often easily be underestimated.

Chris Donohue, GISP

[ChrisDonohue__GISP]

Almost forgot - one more use of Network Analyst that may fit what you need.  If you already have sites chosen, you could run Service Areas.  This could be useful to check your coverage.

Chris Donohue, GISP