The geography of health services, case study of Medina, Saudi Arabia

This study examines health services in Medina in relation to the delivery system, the spatial distribution of health services, accessibility and effectiveness of utilization, including satisfaction with the services. A total of 500 patient questionnaires and 31 face-to-face interviews with key decision makers were used in addressing the research questions.Despite many positive aspects to the health services in Medina, such as the ratios of physicians and beds/population compared to the whole Kingdom's average, there are some problems that need to be overcome. The provision of primary health care centres (PHCCs) is very far from the health ministry target, which is one PHCC to serve 5,000 to 10,000 people and they are unevenly distributed. The capacity of state hospitals is almost full, and needs to be expanded by building another general hospital in the east part of Medina to help remedy the current balance in spatial distribution. The lack of a clear spatial distribution policy for Medina's health services is evident in the concentration of general hospitals on one side of the city. Most private hospitals and clinics (doctors) and groups of clinics are concentrated south and south west of the city centre, in a circle of about two kilometres in diameter. Demographic and socio-economic factors appear to be influential in explaining differences in utilization, access, and preference between types of health services (private/state/traditional healers). Accessibility issues had little effect in making health care users switch to private hospitals. It seems that perceptions of accessibility were influenced by the widespread ownership and use of cars.It appears that consumers' satisfaction with accessibility and quality was higher for private health services than state ones in the study area. However public and private provisions are intercalated in complex ways.Overall, the study shows that, given Saudi's expanding population and growing wealth, there is growing demand for new health facilities and access is stile a major planning issue, although it needs to be reconceptualization in the light of car ownership. New agendas are set for service planning, and for medical geography in the Saudi Arabia

A New Formula for the BER of Binary Modulations with Dual-Branch Selection over Generalized-K Composite Fading Channels

Error performance is one of the main performance measures and derivation of its closed-form expression has proved to be quite involved for certain systems. In this letter, a unified closed-form expression, applicable to different binary modulation schemes, for the bit error rate of dual-branch selection diversity based systems undergoing independent but not necessarily identically distributed generalized-K fading is derived in terms of the extended generalized bivariate Meijer G-function.Comment: Diversity schemes, selection combining, dual-branch selection diversity, binary modulation schemes, generalized-K (GK) model, composite fading, bit error rate (BER), and Meijer G-function distributio

Vision-Assisted User Clustering for Robust mmWave-NOMA Systems

When operated in the mmWave band, user channels get highly correlated which can be exploited in mmWave-NOMA systems to cluster a set of "correlated" users together. Identifying the set of users to cluster greatly affects the viability of NOMA systems. Typically, only channel state information (CSI) is used to make these clustering decisions. When any problem arises in accessing up-to-date and accurate CSI, user clustering will not properly function due to its hard-dependency on CSI, and obviously, this will negatively affect the robustness of the NOMA systems. To improve the robustness of the NOMA systems, we propose to utilize emerging trends such as location-aware and camera-equipped base stations (CBSs) which do not require any extra radio frequency resource consumption. Specifically, we explore three different dimensions of feedback that a CBS can benefit from to solve the user clustering problem, namely CSI-based feedback and non-CSI-based feedback, comprised of user equipment (UE) location and the CBS camera feed. We first investigate how the vision assistance of a CBS can be used in conjunction with other dimensions of feedback to make clustering decisions in various scenarios. Later, we provide a simple user case study to illustrate how to implement vision-assisted user clustering in mmWave-NOMA systems to improve robustness, in which a deep learning (DL) beam selection algorithm is trained on the images captured by the CBS to perform NOMA clustering. We demonstrate that user clustering without CSI can achieve comparable performance to accurate CSI-based solutions, and user clustering can continue to function without much performance loss even in the scenarios where CSI is severely outdated or not available at all.Comment: Accepted in the Proceedings of IEEE Future Networks World Forum (IEEE FNWF 2020

Performance of the General Directorate of Civil Defense during the Hajj season in terms of emergency management

Hajj is the greatest assembly of humankind on earth. More than 2.3 million Muslims attended Hajj this year. During the Hajj period, the mass gathering and movement of pilgrims can at times lead to injury, death, and damage to property and the environment. The increasing number of pilgrims along with their diverse origin and characteristics contributes to the challenging task of minimizing emergencies and risk during the Hajj. The purpose of this research is to examine how the integration of complex environments (Hajj Environment) can improve the General Directorate for Civil Defense (GDCD) task performance in emergency operations. This study will highlight the major factors that assist and impede in performing the work and services of GDCD for encountering the crises and disasters in their various stages during the hajj season and, maintain the safety of pilgrims and their property