Background

Point location data related to primary care services in England has been released on the Neighbourhood Statistics website, which is administered by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), on Thursday 21 June 2007.

Please visit http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/ to get access to the publications. Alternatively instructions to get to the NeSS Access to Primary Care Services Point Location data (Dec 06) are as follows:

Go to NeSS Home Page - http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk

Then click on I want to 'view or download data by topic', then click on Access to Services under 'Neighbourhood Statistics' topics. After this you can access the four new Primary Care Services Point Location datasets. These are:

Dental Surgeries, 2006
GP Practices/Surgeries, 2006
Opticians (Ophthalmic Establishments), 2006
Pharmacies, 2006

Since instigating this project to provide point location data for the Neighbourhood Statistics programme, the NHS Choices website has been developed. This website, which will also provide information about accessibility to services, had a non-public version launched by secretary of state on Monday 11 June.

The Office for National Statistics together with the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit are leading the development of the cross government initiative of the Neighbourhood Statistics Service (NeSS). The PAT 18 report recommended a set of nine domains including housing, health and care, education and crime that should be included on NeSS in order to describe social exclusion in a neighbourhood. Information on these domains (covering England only) is available on the internet at www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk homepage. The Neighbourhood Statistics Team at The IC is responsible for placing health statistics for the health and care and access to services domains for England on the NeSS web site at a small area level.

The access to services domain covers a wide range of topic areas (including dental surgeries, legal services, education establishments) to:

• identify areas in which access to services is poor
• assess location and characteristics of people with restricted access to essential services
• plan improvements in access to services for excluded groups/communities.

Main findings

• Point location of GP surgeries, Dental surgeries, Pharmacies and Ophthalmic Establishments in England will be published on the Neighbourhood Statistics website. The information in these datasets is to be used for statistical purposes and as a tool to support accessibility planning. The data form a subset of that collected by nhs.uk, a central database of all public health service establishments in England maintained by NHS Connecting for Health. Once the data has been cleansed, validated and geo-referenced, the point location of GP surgeries, dental surgeries, pharmacies and ophthalmic establishments in England are displayed on map.
• These datasets are the second health release of point location information on the Neighbourhood Statistics website (point location data for GP surgeries was published on the website in July 2005 and for dental surgeries, pharmacies and ophthalmic establishments in December 2005). These primary care services datasets are part of a package of health point location information on the Neighbourhood Statistics website and are intended as a starting point for the development of more detailed information that will increase understanding of the provision and accessibility of health services in an area. Data suppliers are investigating whether an extension of the dataset can be made available in the future, eg to include details on the facilities available and additional attributes related to the service in future updates.
• The data to be published relates to the point location (in a map format and a downloadable file of some variables) of all GP surgeries, NHS dental surgeries (main site and branch surgeries) within practices, pharmacies (providing NHS dispensing and prescription services) and ophthalmic establishments in England, which were operating in December 2006. Details of the grid reference, establishment name and address and primary care organisation code are also available.
• The dataset covers static point locations of premises. Other health services such as those offered by mobile health professionals, NHS 'Walk In' centres and home visits, pharmacies in hospitals, private dental services (only) and details of dispensing GP surgeries are not covered. Therefore this dataset gives a partial indication of the geographic spread of primary care health services

What do the figures tell us about policy objectives/targets being met?

The information on the location of dental surgeries, pharmacies and ophthalmic establishments will help to address the requirement (by the Transport Act 2000) for local transport authorities in England to prepare local transport plans. Point location details and the range and quality of services will be used to identify social exclusion within both urban and rural areas. From this information exclusion and opportunity can be tackled and accessibility to health services improved for people.