Geographic regions

One of the components of HIFIS that you'll most likely be wanting to customize is the Geographic Regions. There's a drop-down menu containing a list of Geographic Regions, which is used whenever you add a Service Provider (what Geographic Regions does this Service Provider serve?) or a Housing Unit (what Geographic Region is this housing in?), and some other parts of the software too.

The Geographic Region field is used in addition to other location data such as address, postal code, city, and province, so keep that in mind. You can say that a Service Provider is in Oshawa (the City) and also in Durham (the Geographic Region).

The default options in the drop-down menu are:

• This Community
• This Region / County
• This Province / Territory
• Other Province
• Other Territory
• Outside Canada

It’s probably best to think of these values as placeholders that you can modify in your community. So, instead of just leaving it as saying "This Community," you would replace that value with the actual name of the community that you're in.

For example, I live in Kingston, Ontario.  I might replace “This Community” with “Kingston” and “This Region / County” with “Frontenac County” and “This Province / Territory” with “Ontario.”

Some HIFIS 4 installations are quite large, however. For example, the province of New Brunswick is using HIFIS 4 province-wide (so is British Columbia)! It didn't really make sense for them to simply have the list say "New Brunswick," "Other Province," "Other Territory," and "Outside Canada." Instead, they subdivided their catchment area into regions like "Moncton Area" and "Fredericton Area" and "Saint John Area."

 You can sub-divide your service area even further, if that makes sense to you locally. For example, if you have a local encampment area (a tent city) you may want to define that as its own Geographic Region.  Or, if your city is large, you could differentiate between the west end, east end, downtown, north, and south. Whatever makes sense for you locally. 

It is up to you to decide locally what Geographic Regions you want to define, but the good news is that you probably already have a good idea of what regions you already have defined or would like to define. For example, if you were in Vancouver you may want to use the already defined Municipalities, Electoral Areas, and Treaty First Nations that are already well-known.

You may also want to define some other Geographic Regions that are out of your catchment area but you frequently receive referrals from or send referrals to, or you get a lot of people experiencing homelessness coming from or going to. To use Kingston as an example a second time, there are several population centres near the city: Ganonoque, Brockville, Belleville, and Napanee, to name a few. We may want to include those as Geographic Regions - maybe even the Greater Toronto Area and Ottawa too - so that we can have a better understanding of the migration patterns locally.

However you want to define them, your Geographic Regions can help you to obtain geographic data on the services you're providing and the clients you're serving. It provides you with a customizable extra field to track locations in addition to writing out addresses, cities and provinces.