IJPDS International Journal of Population Data Science

In England, how long people live for has stagnated. This may not be considered a serious problem in itself given that people are living longer than ever as a result of significant progress in healthcare since the early twentieth century. The biggest issue we face today is a widening gap between those living long and relatively healthy lives in some areas compared to others, and people experiencing disadvantage and inequality.

The cause of this widening gap is complex, but is likely to lie in the opportunities, behaviours and resources around us that have a large influence on our health. Our background, ethnicity and age certainly play a role but also many other things like lifestyle choices, services, green environments, housing and much more. Multiple factors that have an impact on our health are known as the wider determinants of health, and ensuring equity in the quality of our living environments is so important for ensuring we live long and healthy lives.

Artwork created by a project public contributors during a creative session exploring the issues around access to data for research.

Much of the power to influence the wider determinants of health lie with local government and public health teams in England. Intelligence and data about our health and the environments we live in has the potential to help us understand what is at play in areas of declining health. However, despite data being out there to help us understand what is happening to create inequality, it is not all in one place, is not comprehensive, nor linked up.

A current NHS England initiative (Secure Data Environments) is starting to create better access and linked up health data with the ability to share data with researchers in a safe and anonymous way. This is good news! But … if we don’t have similar efforts to pull together and link up data on our environment and those wider determinants of health, we cannot begin to understand in detail the causes of inequality in how long we live across England.

Researchers from the University of Kent have started this process and conducted a thorough mapping of the internet to find data that is free for public use and relevant. They searched for data that could help describe individual towns or smaller areas within towns that might help us see what, in our environment, is causing pockets of poor health. The team used a broad range of search terms in internet search engines and AI chatbots like ChatGPT to identify data that might be useful, and found 105 weblinks that contained links to data that were potentially relevant.

Of these, 21 were chosen to explore further, from which 89 individual datasets were compiled, all with data that described places in England down to small, within town areas. The findings covered many valuable areas with respect to wider determinants of health, but some gaps existed including information on food consumption, social care and community/voluntary services.

In a new article ‘Exploring freely accessible data describing wider determinants of health in England’ published in the International Journal of Population Data Science (IJPDS), the datasets are presented in more detail. This is a useful resource to researchers, local government, decision makers and the public to help explore what elements of our population, environment and services that may be linked to our health in England.

 

Click here to view the full article

Dr Melanie Rees-Roberts, Unlocking Data Project co-lead, Centre for Health Services Studies, University of Kent

Childs, S., Farmer, C., George, A., Ford, E. and Rees-Roberts, M. (2023) “Data resource profile: Exploring freely accessible data describing wider determinants of health in England”, International Journal of Population Data Science, 8(6). doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v8i6.2384.