ANNOUNCEMENTS
As Pune strives to become more ‘livable’ and achieve the idea of ‘well-being of society’ in its local-area based as well as pan-city development under the Smart City Mission, it intends to adopt an ‘inclusive approach’. Pune Smart City has identified ‘local area initiatives to drive socially inclusive growth in the region’, as one of the key themes and addresses it by focusing on skill-building, healthcare, education and slum-redevelopment. The Smart Clinics project, is one such flagship initiative under this theme, which envisions the idea of inclusive access to healthcare infrastructure and seeks to improve the currently skewed and inadequate picture of primary healthcare infrastructure in the city. Though, partially implemented at a pilot level in the Aundh-Baner-Balewadi area, the vision of scaling up the model to setup 100 Smart Clinics at a pan-city level, is in a nascent stage of development. Drawing on this scope at a planning level, this study aims to analyze the spatial pattern of existing infrastructure for primary healthcare centers (PHCs) and assess the requirement of new PHCs based on prevailing gaps. This analysis has been further used to propose an innovative technique of GIS-based planning of healthcare facilities, using ‘Location-Allocation Model’, that maximizes the healthcare coverage across the city. Along with suggesting the location of 100 Smart Clinics, the research also puts forth an IT-platform based ‘Digital Health Ecosystem Model’ to maintain, manage and strengthen the proposed network of inclusive healthcare infrastructure system.
Keywords: primary healthcare, inclusive, access, GIS-based planning, location-allocation model.
