HEALTH INEQUALITIES
From a socio-economic point of view Southwark is very heterogenous. The presence of different ethnic groups, high levels of deprivation and other social emergencies constitute the shaky foundation of a continuously reshaping social structure.
This fast changing environment, reflected in the population's health profiles, means that the Borough offers a number of difficult challenges to health policy. Southwark Primary Care Trust needs an adequate evidence base, built upon reliable and consistent information resources, This has implications, for example, for monitoring and remunerating GPs and for supporting PCTs when allocating budgets.
The data used for the exploratory diseases maps are the up to the 14 of February 2006, the National Prevalence Day (NPD), and submitted to QMAS by each practice. As previously said, we chose to use these data for their high reliability due to the billing purposes which they are collected for.
Each map shows the Standardised Prevalence Ratios (SPR) and Unadjusted Prevalence Rates in each GP practice in Southwark. To achieve more geographic information, data have been also re-aggregated in such a way that the surfaces displayed are consistent.
It is then possible to compare the SPR of each single practice with the National Level and through the confidence interval displayed in the tables, to verify whether the differences occur by chance or are effectively the result of an underlying trend.
Surfaces are obtained through an interpolation of the raw prevalence rates, calculated as counts divided by the number of patients registered, in each geographic location. In this way it is possible to uncover local variations from the overall Southwark trend and to compare them with the practice's adjusted ratio as previously described.
