Project PEDS04

Bespoke SHAPE atlas for ARC East of England

This project built on the existing SHAPE platform to provide NIHR ARC East of England an interactive visual map of the Population in Focus (PiF) areas. The bespoke SHAPE Atlas can be used to map health indicators and ARC activity for each PiF area.

Summary

The ARC East of England partnership is working together to carry out applied research that will make a positive difference to health and social care services, patients and the public. Various projects are occurring across our seven themes. Knowledge of the projects, communities they involve and data they are generating can help those within the ARC and those communities more effectively built this research.

Strategic Health Asset Planning and Evaluation (SHAPE) is a web-based tool designed to inform and support the strategic planning of services. SHAPE seeks to bring key information together from a range of sources to provide an interactive and easy to interpret tool to support the local reconfiguration of services and assets.

This project built on the existing SHAPE platform to provide NIHR ARC East of England an interactive visual map of the Population in Focus (PiF) areas. The bespoke SHAPE Atlas can be used to map health indicators and ARC activity for each PiF area.

Project aims

Provided an accessible visualisation of ARC East of England activity and mechanism to visualise data on our Populations in Focus.

Specific objectives

  • Created a user-defined boundary for each of the four PiF areas.
  • Compiled a list of ARC East of England activities and identify key features that would be useful to visualise.
  • Identified mechanisms to update the bespoke atlas as the project progress and data relating to our PiFs is generated.

Project activity 

The project utilised the existing SHAPE Place atlas, which includes the following key functionality:

  • Interactive map view from England levels down to street level view. Location of key healthcare sites including primary, secondary and tertiary health care
  • Ability to export site list to excel
  • Compare the location of sites against indicator layers such as population by age band, IMD, Population projections and rates of hospital episode statistic
  • Visualising geographic boundaries (specifically STP, CCG or LA). Can identify which sites are within each of those geographical boundaries.
  • 12 months of supported hosting including maintenance and updates to data and indicators mentioned above.

SHAPE also provided enhanced functionality specific to this commission:

  • Creating a user-defined boundary for each of the four Population in Focus areas (these are aggregations of existing lower-tier local authorities)
  • Projects are categorised into seven themes. A single theme or multiple themes can be selected and then viewed on the map. This will provide a visualisation of the coverage of projects going on in each PiF area.  When a theme is selected, all the areas that have a project under this theme will have a coloured icon appear in the centroid of the PiF. 
  • Pin protected area which will contain the existing projects/themes. One pin code will be supplied to NIHR ARC for them to distribute as required. 
  • A further phase of the development could be to provide key indicators about each PiF area. These would be the aggregation of the existing SHAPE indicators so values would be returned for each PiF.  

Resources

Access SHAPE Atlas website

Researchers and institutions

Dr. Sian Evans, Public Health England 

Barbara Coyle, Public Health England 

Contact

Dr. Sian Evans

Email: Sian.Evans@phe.gov.uk

PEDS04