5.6 Assignment

This section comprises the assignment for this unit. In the earlier parts of this unit you have reviewed concepts of accessibility to health care, and looked at some of the issues surrounding the way patients’ travel to access health care and how this travel can be represented, modelled, and quantified in GIS.

Assignment – geographic access to healthcare:

Choose a case study area in either the UK or South Africa and a specific form of healthcare provision (e.g. primary care; pharmacies).  Examples of appropriate case study areas might be a Clinical Commissioning Group in England and Wales or a municipality in South Africa.

For your chosen study site, population, and form of healthcare provision create two measures of geographic access to healthcare facilities, drawing on the module materials.  You could for example compare Euclidean distances with drive-times, compare drive-times produced via two different methods, or compare a cost surface-based travel time with Euclidean distance. In a report of no more than 1,800 words, document the methods and data that you used to produce your two measures.  Produce maps of both access measures, and compare and contrast the two measures of healthcare access.  Drawing on your practical work, critically evaluate methods for measuring geographic access to healthcare for your chosen population and form of healthcare.

Advice on data and pre-processing:

You should be able to identify appropriate sources of population data for your chosen study site from material covered earlier in the module, particularly for the first assignment. In deciding on a study area in England and Wales, you can find Clinical Commissioning Group boundaries here:

https://borders.ukdataservice.ac.uk/easy_download.html

Health facility locations and related data (e.g. of primary care facilities) may be accessed via the HealthSites project for South Africa:

https://healthsites.io/

…or via OpenStreetMap.

Postcodes for pharmacies and primary care practices may be accessed via NHS Digital for England and Wales:

https://digital.nhs.uk/organisation-data-service/data-downloads/gp-data

Postcodes for UK-based healthcare facilities will likely need geocoding prior to use.  Any one of several geocoding services could be used for this, such as:

http://geoconvert.mimas.ac.uk/

https://www.doogal.co.uk/BatchGeocoding.php

 

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