Meridian Awards 2012

As a Public Health Analyst, I regularly use my GIS specialism to create numerous thematic maps highlighting disease prevalences, mortality, etc.  But for this case study, my skills were to broaden thanks to the use of MapInfo v10.

Each GP surgery has a catchment area, and for Bromley PCT these catchment areas were recorded in the old fashioned away - with a trusty pen and  a paper map.

Using MapInfo I was able to electronically recreate all of Bromley's catchement areas, collating the roads that are contained within each area.  For one particular practice, the lead GP was due to retire and thus the practice was to shut.  Therefore all of the GP's registere patients had to be dispersed to other neighbouring practices.

To do this, using MapInfo, I was able to geocode each of the patient using their postcode and then by using the catchment areas that I had previously created I was able to produce a list for each patient as to which other surgery their postcode resided.  This then enabled the Primary Care team to send out postal letters to each patient identifying their list of available surgeries along with contact details.

After a short period of time, most of the patients had successfully registered with other practices, but there was still a number of patients that had not registered with anyone.   So using the distance analysis tool within MapInfo, I was able to workout which single practice each of the patients postcode was closest too.  This information was then passed onto the Primary Care team again, who were able to contact each patient and help them to register with their closest surgery.

Without the use of MapInfo there would have been no viable way of knowing:

1. where the patients were located in relation to other practices
2. which surgery's catchment boundaries overlapped
3. the nearest single surgery to each patient.

MapInfo proved to be totally invaluable in this process and resulted in the successful dispersion of all patients.