Health Inequalities Explorer
A quick overview and guide
Introduction
A mountainous amount of health data is available in the UK. Navigating through this landscape is no easy feat. Data is available in differing time bands, across differing geographies, and differing domains of health. How might one charter through this terrain to reach the summit of insight?
A good orienteer will tell you to grab your compass from your backpack and charter the way. But, what if no compass exists? Well, you could make one of course! And this is what we did.
The Health Inequalities Explorer is a new open access web app to explore location based health inequalities across different UK geographies (currently limited to England, with devolved nations coming soon!), developed by the Strategic Insight and Foresight team at the British Red Cross. It is a compass we have created to help you scale the peaks and valleys of the health inequalities data-scape.
Quick user guide
The Health Inequalities Explorer has been designed to be simple to use. First, you select different geographical areas you would like to compare. For example, here we select three local authorities we are interested in, which are Manchester, North Devon, and West Oxfordshire:
Then, the tool automatically populates plots comparing the performance of your selected areas across different indicators, grouped into three different groups: summary indicators (that aim to combine health inequalities into a single score), secondary care indicators (that map the performance of a certain aspect of the health system), and demographics. Below we can see how our selected areas perform across different summary indicators:
A quick glance at the plot reveals that Manchester performs worse across all summary indicators than the other selected areas, and worse than most other, non selected, areas nationally too! A signal that Manchester’s need is much higher than the comparison areas and national average.
The more observant reader may have noticed that the x-axis ranges from -1.0 to 1.0. This is because the different indicators use different units and scales. To make them all comparable on the same plot, we used some statistical transformations to squash their respective scales down to the same range. If you want to see the underlying data that determined a points position on the plot, you can hover over that point to bring up an interactive dialogue:
Here, we can see that Manchester has four left-behind wards, which makes up 12.5% of all wards. A left-behind ward is an area that scores highly in deprivation, and poorly in social infrastructure, and these areas are often associated with high health inequalities. What if you didn’t already know this? Well, under each plot is a button called “Show indicator details”, that once clicked allows you to find more information and links to further resources:
Additional functionality
Continuing from our example above, let’s imagine that you wanted to include an image of one of the plots in a presentation for a commissioner. How might you go about this? First, you might want to toggle off all the non selected areas as they are adding some noise to the plot. This can be easily done by clicking the “not selected” item in the legend:
Then to download the plot, You can hit the “Download plot as a png” button in the top right-corner of the plot window:
And voila! A high resolution plot will be downloaded automatically for use in your reports.
What’s next?
Currently, the Health Inequalities Explorer is limited to English local authorities and integrated care boards. Data for the devolved nations is being added, with an initial release for Scotland forecast for the end of May.
In addition to covering the devolved nations, new data sets and features are scheduled to be added over the coming year too. Watch this space!
