Tuesday, February 06, 2018

Mapping UK Health Deserts


The Centre for Towns has a number of interesting interactive maps visualizing access to health services in England, Scotland and Wales. These include visualizations of how near to health services people live and their travel times to the nearest hospital.

The Access to Health Services maps show how near people in England, Scotland and Wales live to their local hospital, GP, pharmacy and dentist. These maps provide an easy way to identify areas with good access to health care facilities and those areas with much poorer access to health providers.

The Travel Times to Hospital map shows the estimated travel times to hospital using a car or a bus in every part of England. This map's isochrone layer identifies areas of England where it would take a long time to get to the nearest hospital.

Obviously hospitals and health care service tend to be sited in the most populated areas of the country. Therefore people living in towns and cities will usually have better and quicker access to health care services than those living in more rural areas. The Centre for Towns maps would be more useful if they included a population layer so that users could pinpoint those areas where the most people have poor access to health care services.

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