Providing cancer information and statistics for Clinical Commissioning Groups
Responsibility for commissioning health care is to move from Primary Care Trusts
(PCTs) to Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in April 2013. By October 2011 the Department
of Health had approved 30 CCGs in West Midlands. To provide the best cancer information and
statistics for these CCGs the cancer registry must be able to identify both the number of
cancers diagnosed and the population profile of every CCG either by resident or registered
population. The WMCIU has used case studies of 4 CCGs to assess how we might provide cancer
statistics for them and how robust those statistics will be.
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Methods & Examples
GIS can provide a wide variety of analyses and visual outputs. The most common are:
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Location maps – can be used to identify point locations of services, e.g. GP surgeries, hospitals, etc. Additional topographic information e.g. roads can be added to enhance the visual identification of the locality.
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Administrative maps – similar to location maps but are used to identify service locations in terms of relevant area boundaries (e.g. electoral, health, statistical and local government areas). These can be enhanced by adding topographic information.
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Topographic maps – primarily used to portray information about the physical features of the earth’s surface. Topographic information may be natural, man-made, cultural or political features. |
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Thematic maps – designed to demonstrate the spatial variability of one or more quantitative or qualitative variables (e.g. population, incidence of disease or deprivation measures). |
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The most common form is chloropleth mapping which uses qualitative colour schemes to identify areas with similar values in same way.
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Spatial distributions – a specific type of thematic mapping that utilises symbols and colour schemes to classify sets of point data according to qualitative and quantitative information. |
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Buffer zones – these can be used for a variety of analyses, e.g. to define simple “as the crow flies” travel zones or defining exposures to environmental factors. |
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Travel time zones – travel time analyses utilise the road and street maps from OS to create networks to define areas in which it is possible to travel to a defined location within a certain period. |
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Service catchment areas – may be described in a number of ways. Depending on the service under consideration a number of factors may influence how a catchment are is defined e.g. the location of existing services, its patient locations and the geography of the area can all be important considerations. |
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