Geographic information

The Sheffield interactive health and well-being atlas

16 October 2007

Sheffield Primary Care Trust has used a graphical and mapping tool to display health and well-being factors for the city's neighbourhoods and districts in an interactive online atlas.

The Sheffield Primary Care Trust (PCT) was formed in October 2006 from the merger of North Sheffield PCT, South East Sheffield PCT, Sheffield South West PCT and Sheffield West PCT.

As part of its remit to engage with the local population to improve health and well-being, Sheffield PCT, like all PCTs, has a duty to make its local health statistics available to policy makers, health professionals, local government agencies and the public.

Finding that its audience for public health data had little appetite for multiple spreadsheets of complex statistics, it looked for a solution to communicate local health indicators more clearly. The Trust chose InstantAtlas, a software tool from GeoWise that graphically presents geographical and statistical data so that regional and local patterns become easy to see and explore.

The complex data was represented in the Sheffield Health and Wellbeing Atlas. This interactive graphical resource contributed to their 2006 public health report winning an award from the Association of Directors of Public Health.

“In previous years, we provided online access to spreadsheets of figures. Key departments in public agencies and within the PCT were also provided with various analyses and graphs to meet their standard needs,” said Tamsin Jones, of the public health analysis team at Sheffield PCT. “But we received frequent ad-hoc requests for data and analyses additional to those provided. It took us time to deliver this additional information.

“Busy decision makers looking to take actions and the public want easy access to information. Mostly our audiences don’t want to scour spreadsheets for relevant data, then construct statistical analyses and graphs themselves.”

Sheffield PCT published the Sheffield Health and Wellbeing Atlas online in February 2007. It displays data at different geographic levels across the city and allows interactive interrogation. The levels currently available are the city’s 100 neighbourhoods, and seven service districts. The atlas is constantly updated as new data becomes available.

Data is grouped under the headings of births, dental health, deprivation, disease groups, education, environment, housing, life expectancy, mortality, and population. Data is available for several years, allowing time-trend analysis. The Atlas contains themed maps, data tables, trend tables, graphs covering all of these areas, details of data sources and data notes. There is also a detailed user guide.

Screenshot of the Sheffield Health and Well-being Atlas
showing average age at first birth in Sheffield neighbourhoods.

Public health report

Sheffield’s Director of Public Health Report for 2006 presents numerous links to the atlas to help illustrate key points. Jeremy Wight, Sheffield Director of Public Health said: “Throughout the Sheffield Director of Public Health Report for 2006, the Sheffield Health and Wellbeing Atlas is now accessible, which presents a huge amount of health data in a way we’ve not been able to do before. If you want to know about health in your neighbourhood, this is the place to look”

The Atlas now allows people to easily access Sheffield’s health data. Users can interact with it intuitively to define precisely the statistics and comparisons they want. They can view the results as colourful  atlases, profiles, dashboards, performance reports and other graphics; aiding understanding. Users can also perform custom trend analyses, a service Sheffield didn’t comprehensively offer before. And of course information can be called up almost instantly, rather than ad-hoc requests taking hours or days to process as they did before when fulfilled manually.

“InstantAtlas is helping us get health messages across through visual communications rather than rows of numbers. This saves our audiences time and makes the data much more stimulating and easier to understand,” said Jones. “We can add commentary to presentations to assist interpretation too.”

Extra benefits

As well as the key added-value of improving information accessibility, there are efficiency gains. “InstantAtlas reduces our need to manually service health data requests, saving us several hours a week,” explained Jones. “I would estimate that we give around three days a year to manually uploading new data to InstantAtlas, so as well as improving our information service, there is a clear net efficiency improvement.”

Other PCTs have taken quite an interest in the Sheffield Health and Wellbeing Atlas and have met the PCT to learn about the processes and tools behind it. Public health professionals working with community groups have expressed their commendations too and various local health agencies offer web links to the atlas.

The atlas has also contributed to a prestigious public health award for Sheffield PCT. “The Association of Directors of Public Health (ADPH) praised us for our innovative approach to our 2006 public health report, especially its accessibility using interactive multimedia such as InstantAtlas,” said Jones. “We won first prize in the ADPH annual competition for the best PCT report!”

Further information

Sheffield Health and Well-being Atlas