Health GIS: A Case Study of Leeds City Council (UK) for Carrying Out Food Hygiene Inspections

要旨

Clean and healthy environment is a fundamental part of sustainable development for urban areas. Unrestrained expansion of urban areas, population explosion, tremendous increase in use of synthetics and unhealthy waste disposal from various food products are the major contributors for degradation of our environment. This paper focuses on analyzing the framework of Environmental Health department of Leeds City Council in carrying out the planning and execution of Food Hygiene Inspections using GIS. Leeds City Council (LCC) is a metropolitan council with a population of 7,15,404. The total number of premises that comes under Food Premises Regulation 1992 in Leeds is approximately 8000 out of a total of 577,893 in UK. LCC visualized the need of modern technological tools to keep up pace; resultant is an induction of ESRI backed GIS system (CAPS UNI-form), replacing older UNIX based system (MKA), capable of handling various situations and enabling the Environmental Health Practitioners to perform there tasks. A Food Hygiene Inspection is explained in a spatial context to improve efficiency and keep a track of information at mezzo level. The analyses revealed that there are missing links and requires lot of improvement in this area of Health GIS.