DEFINING LOCALITIES FOR HEALTH-PLANNING - A GIS APPROACH

The National Health Service in Britain is undergoing far-reaching chan ges. While District and Regional Health Authorities are currently merg ing, professionals agree that primary health care is most efficiently managed at the local level. This paper uses geographical information s ystems (GIS) capabilities to identify a nested hierarchy of localities for the management of primary health care in West Sussex, England. GI S coverages were developed which contained key criteria for defining l ocal areas, including nodes or focal points of service provision, edge s which act as physical or psychological barriers to movement, distric ts such as official administrative areas and interaction criteria such as journey to work, school and family doctor (GP) surgeries. Central to the derivation of the localities was a large matrix of patient to G P hows based on postcoded data. Once managed, these data revealed clea r geographical patterns of patient to GP allegiance. A large-scale fie ld survey obtained supporting information on the perception of areas f rom local residents.