Potential meets reality: GIS and public health research in Australia

Geographical Information Systems-computerised systems for the capture, storage, retrieval, analysis and display of spatial data-have recently been promoted as important tools for the study of public health. Attention must also be given to the issues involved in this relatively new application, especially in Australian conditions. These include the coarse spatial resolution of most health and social data, the propagation of error through the need to use estimates and concordance tables to handle data in mismatched official spatial boundaries, the inflexible analytical capacity of most GIS for the needs of epidemiology, and difficulties in access to data, which are compounded by the absence of a good metadata register. The conflict between the need for spatial precision in GIS and preserving the confidentiality of health data is a salient issue. Medical geographers and public health researchers using GIS must recognise these issues in order to work together and toward extending the use of GIS technology beyond broad ecological and accessibility studies.