The Moving Target: A Geographic Index of Relative Wellbeing

Abstract

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been widely used by health planners and professionals to map and describe disease occurrence, spread, and exposure. Increasingly, GIS is being used to measure accessibility to health services in order to better manage scarce resources and to ensure equity and accountability. We argue that health planners can use readily available census data to understand the demands and needs of particular population by identifying key indicators that have a direct or indirect impact on individual health and community well-being. We present an Index of Relative Wellbeing, a weighted basket of 10 key variables from the Census that can be used to describe the health status of a particular census area. Health planners can use this index within a GIS to conduct spatial and temporal analyses. Our research demonstrates that the spatial distribution of health inequalities can be carefully documented and be directly used in the policymaking arena.

Correlation of the ratio of metastatic to non-metastatic cancer cases with the degree of socioeconomic deprivation among Texas counties

“…The present study used the Wellbeing Index (WI) developed by Albrecht and Ramasubramanian [3], which is derived from 10 socioeconomic status variables (Table 1) from the US census data. WI ranges from 1 to 10 with 1 as the best wellbeing or least deprivation.…”

“…A critical issue is how to measure the socioeconomic status at the community level using readily available census information that might be used to predict health status using information from disease registries. Variables related to socioeconomic status from census data have been used for this purpose for community assessment [2,3]. Having a reliable and easy means for performing area or community-wide assessments is useful for identifying targets for public health programs including cancer control activities.…”

“…Others have developed similar deprivation indices based on US census data. Studies have shown that these deprivation indices are good predictors of health status [3,4]. For example, Salmond et al found that hospital discharge rate and mortality of all causes in the Wellington region and national cancer registrations for lung cancer in New Zealand were significantly and positively correlated with the NZDep91 [5].…”

Piloting the Geographic Information System (GIS) Methodology as an Analytic Tool for Subjective Wellbeing Research

“…GIS can also be interrelated with other data by producing spatial maps that include thematic layers of LGAs or neighbourhood boundaries, physical geography, climate, road networks, or incidence of disease. The technique is useful in public health research and epidemiology because it provides a space or place based context for measuring and describing the occurrence and spread of disease or wellbeing (Albrecht and Ramasubramanian 2004).…”

Open-Source web-based geographical information system for health exposure assessment

“…Developments in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have now made the mapping of this information commonplace and are used in a large range of applications. Within the environment and health fields, recent applications using GIS have been used in projects such as identifying regions at risk to malaria [4], monitoring effects of air pollution on asthmatics [5] and defining an " Index of Relative Wellbeing " for an area from census data [6]. …”