Lab 3 - Distribution of Free Clnics in LA

The topic of investigation for this week's lab will be how free clinics are distributed in Los Angeles County and how they correlate with areas of poverty. This topic is of interest to me due to my public health background. Health should be a right for everything, however the healthcare system in the U.S. treats it as a privilege for those who can afford it. Community and Free clinics attempt to ameliorate issue by offering free or low-cost health care to those who cannot afford to buy health insurance. However, transportation may be an issue for the population targeted by free clinics so the proximity of these clinics to their target population is important.

The following map shows the distribution of free clinics in Los Angeles County (minus the San Fernando Valley).

The points are geocoded locations of free clinics with 1.5 mile buffers to indivate the accessibility of the clinics to the local population.

As you can see the free clinics are clustered around downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Long Beach, and the Venice area, all areas with high concentrations of the homeless and low-income population. However, a significant portion of the low-income population live in south central and east LA, areas without very many free clinics accessible to this population.

GIS is a very important tool for decision makers as it can present complex data in a very understandable visual format. Without GIS, decision makers would need to present their data in tables. This way of presenting data is very unwieldy due the large number of free clinics and the difficulty of visualizing spatial data in a tabular format. Another option would be to generate maps either manually or with another computer program not dedicated to working with maps. This may be a source of error due to human error in the map creation process. Thus GIS, streamlines and facilitates map creation and the presentation of spatial data analysis.