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| Team find sickly postcodes |
Academics launch
scheme to track link between health and wealth
THE impact poverty has on people’s health
will be put under the spotlight by academics conducting a survey
in Camden.
The UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Awareness (Casa) has
teamed up with the university college’s geography department
to map Camden’s health.
Researchers hope special “postcode profiles” will help
health chiefs understand Camden’s diverse needs.
The UCL was awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KPT), which
is a government scheme that transfers research from universities
into the public sector. In this case, the government has funded
the UCL to work with the Camden Primary Care Trust (CPCT) to tackle
health problems based on postcodes.
With affluent households next to deprived estates, Camden has great
social inequalities.
Half of the borough is classed within the 20 per cent most deprived
areas in the country.
And there are wide differences in life expectancy between wards.
For men, life expectancy ranges between 80.2 years in Belsize Park
and 69.9 years in Kilburn ward.
Suicide rates are 30 per cent higher than the national average in
Kentish Town, Kilburn and St Pancras and Somers Town wards, whereas
Belsize ward has rates more than 20 per cent lower than expected.
The project, led by UCL Professor Paul Longley and Kate Jones from
the CPCT, will use geographic information systems (GIS) to encourage
greater health awareness.
GIS views and analyses data from a geographic perspective. It links
information to location such as people to addresses.
Kate Jones and Pablo Mateos, who work for the primary care trust
and Casa, wanted to use postcode profiles to understand why some
women, between 50 and 65 and often from ethnic minorities, did not
respond to requests for breast screening last year. She said women
were less likely to go for screening in deprived parts of Camden.
She said: “We wanted to explore the reasons why many women
were not responding to invites for breast screening. The analysis
enabled us to understand the low uptake at a neighbourhood level.
This is a complex environmental and social problem. People have
different levels of expectation and awareness about breast screening
because of where they live.”
Professor Longley said interventions to reduce health inequalities
in Camden had been ineffective. But the professor expects the new
programme to have a significant impact. He said: “It’s
about time we started breaking down health figures and understand
them geographically. It is the only way to progress.” |
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