Constructing a comparison group for Greater Manchester to identify gaps in prevalence, healthcare utilisation, and costs
What are we trying to do?
There are limited tools that allow healthcare providers and commissioners to benchmark differences in the underlying health and healthcare provided to neighbourhoods and regions with similar demographics and social determinants of health.
In this project, we aim to identify comparable neighbourhoods based on their:
- distribution of demographics (how different characteristics of a population are spread out or divided within a region)
- social determinants of health (the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age that affect their health outcomes)
- geographical characteristics.
Matched neighbourhoods will then be combined to allow us to compare differences in outcomes across larger areas (for example, between sub-Integrated Care Boards (sub-ICBs)).
Why is this important?
Having comparison groups for neighbourhoods and regions will allow us to identify and benchmark the differences in health and healthcare between ICBs in England. This, in turn, will help us design further research to identify areas that require improvement and those we can learn from.
How are we doing it?
We will use ‘clustering methods’ to identify comparable neighbourhoods with similar population profiles (for example, age, sex, ethnicity and religion) and health determinants (for example, income, types of jobs, housing quality, levels of crime and healthy behaviours).
We will use the World Health Organisation social determinants of health framework to select which characteristics are used to match similar neighbourhoods.
We will combine small-area-level data from the following sources:
- 2021 National Census
- 2019 Indices of Multiple Deprivation
- Other
- sources available at the small area level.
Because the regions we want to compare are not alike, we will identify weighted combinations of other sub-ICBs in the rest of the country.
Who are we working with?
More information
Senior Programme Lead
Mike Spence
Michael.spence@manchester.ac.uk