Location Efficiency of Healthcare Facilities in Ikot Ekpene Local Government of Akwa-Ibom State: the Role of Geographical Information System (GIS) Elijah Akwarandu Njoku 1, *, Patrick Etim Akpan 2 1 Department of Geography and Regional Planning, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria 2 Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Akwa Ibom Sate Polytechnic, Ikot Osurua, Nigeria *E-mail address: voices4andy@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Given the effect of locational decisions on access and utilization of healthcare facilities in any society, the current study attempted an evaluation of the locational efficiency of available health facilities in Ikot Ekpene LGA with a view to ascertain the distributional pattern of the health care centers in the study area. It was discovered that health care centers in the area are randomly distributed but moderately concentrated in a few wards leaving more than half the area under-served. Using a WHO population/distance criterion of 1/4km, it is shown that only a small portion of the study area has effective access to healthcare facilities. Potential sites for location of additional health centers were suggested and the capability of Geographical Information System (GIS) in spatial planning and healthcare facility management is demonstrated. Keywords: GIS; Utilization; Healthcare; Locational; Database 1. INTRODUCTION The importance of effective and accessible health care system in any country cannot be over-emphasized. In Nigeria, the provision of health care facilities is the responsibility of all the three tiers of government (Abbas et al, 2012). However, due to high demand on and perhaps poor quality service delivery by the public health facilities, the private sector is playing a visible complimentary role in the provision of healthcare facilities in Nigeria. While the private sector is driven primarily by economic considerations in their location decisions, the public sector is apparently concerned with maximizing access of the target population to the facilities. Recent studies have established a correlation between different types of access (geographical, temporal and financial) and effective utilization of healthcare facilities and services (see Schoeps et al, 2011, Moisi et al, 2010 and Malqvist et al, 2010). Although a lot of money is budgeted for healthcare delivery each year in Nigeria (more than 4.6 % of annual budget), inadequacy of fund and excessive administrative and bureaucratic bottleneck have meant that aggregate demand for health care services has always outstripped the supply. International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Online: 2013-10-31 ISSN: 2300-2697, Vol. 15, pp 22-30 doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.15.22 2014 SciPress Ltd, Switzerland SciPress applies the CC-BY 4.0 license to works we publish: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/