 Defining localities for health planning: A GIS approachNina Bullen, Graham Moon and Kelvyn Jones Social Science & Medicine, 1996, vol. 42, issue 6, 801-816 Abstract: The National Health Service in Britain is undergoing far-reaching changes. While District and Regional Health Authorities are currently merging, professionals agree that primary health care is most efficiently managed at the local level. This paper uses geographical information systems (GIS) capabilities to identify a nested hierarchy of localities for the management of primary health care in West Sussex, England. GIS coverages were developed which contained key criteria for defining local areas, including nodes or focal points of service provision, edges which act as physical or psychological barriers to movement, districts such as official administrative areas and interaction criteria such as journey to work, school and family doctor (GP) surgeries. Central to the derivation of the localities was a large matrix of patient to GP flows based on postcoded data. Once managed, these data revealed clear geographical patterns of patient to GP allegiance. A large-scale field survey obtained supporting information on the perception of areas from local residents. Keywords: health; planning; locality; geographical; information; systems (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:42:y:1996:i:6:p:801-816 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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