Scope of GIS in Dental Public Health: A Review

Introduction

The universal priority among all the nations is to improve health as well as oral health. Oral health promotion includes understanding various health determinants like socio-demographic, economic, political and environmental factors (Davenhall & Kinabrew, 2012). Traditional approaches in dental public health have been criticized for their inability to account for either the spatial variations of population demand and dentist supply within those boundaries or for population–dentist interactions across them (Thanakanjanaphakdee, et al., 2019). This problem rose because only few healthcare professionals are educated sufficiently in the areas of geography like climate, population distribution, culture, social organisation, methodological techniques that geographers commonly use in spatial analysis (Dummer, 2008). Aerial photography had been used in the past to identify and map disease vector habitats. The study of the geographic distribution of disease dates back to the Greek Physician Hippocrates (5th century B.C.). The social and physical environment in which people live, their behaviour, nutrition status, immunity level and health care are recognized as interacting factors in disease causation, health as well as oral health (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Environmental impact on health and oral health

Medical Geography, a sub-field of geography, emerged in the mid-19^th century and focuses on the spatial distribution of disease and health care, with associative analyses of environmental influences. The spatial research, one of the evolving technologies, helps inoral health promotion by identification of oral health care delivery systems, their features, location, planning and utilization. Geographical Information System (GIS) is one such technology which is used to map, store, retrieve and manipulate spatially referenced data (Susi & Mascarenhas, 2002).The purpose of this article is to review various GIS applications in dental public health and to critically examine the strengths, limitations and challenges inherent to those approaches from the perspective of dental public health.

Background

The field of Geography is evolving beyond its boundaries. One of the growing fields is Medical Geography which is the study and application of geography concepts and techniques to health related problems (Valencius, 2000; Ajaegbu, 1992). It looks holistically at the geography of disease and healthcare and its relationship within space and time. Medical Geography is a part of individual health as well as public health which helps in understanding the human – environment interactions and the influence of these interactions on public health, the cause of disease outbreaks and chronic diseases. The study by John Snow in 1854 was a milestone in detecting the source of infection during cholera epidemic that broke out in London. Having mapped the locations of those individuals who were affected, he concluded that contaminated water was the cause of the outbreak (Davenhall, et al., 2012). In 1957, the gravity model was used by Hunter and Young to study the diffusion of influenza disease in England and Wales. The centroid of influenza cases was located week by week using this model (Hunter & Young, 1971). From then, public health and medical professionals have utilized geography due to the mapping and spatial analysis capabilities of the time and place.