Consortia, Commssioning Groups and Coterminosity

Well, the Future Forum has reported and the Government has responded. What have we learnt that is new? I guess one thing that will have lifted our spirits a little is the announcement that GP consortia, or rather Clinical Commissioning Groups as we should now call them, should not cross local authority boundaries unless there is a reasonable justification.

At the moment if the East of England is typical (and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t) there is huge variation in size of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), covering populations of less than 20,000 up to populations of almost 600,000. Although many CCGs sit within one existing PCT area there are a number that cross both PCT and LA boundaries. The difficulties of mapping a practice population combined with the complex pattern of CCGs across the country means that producing useful geographical based information for CCGs is challenging.

Along with the announcement that the CCGs should not normally cross LA boundaries was the announcement that the CCGs should have names that relate to the area that they cover. Whilst new names may be a bit boring compared with some of the Apprentice style names that they are currently coming up with, it will surely make life easier for both patients and also those of us that work with health data if we can relate a CCG to the population it serves.

The age old problems of changing boundaries and new organisations have not been solved, but maybe life will be just a little easier than it might have been!

John Battersby
Eastern region Public Health Observatory

Web Data - What do you want?

Searching for your thoughts - Kristin Warry, Swindon Borough Council, LPS SIG web coordinator.

More and more suppliers want to offer Web Map or Feature Services - this gives Raster or vector data respectively from the web instead of you storing and translating yourself. In Swindon we have found that good WMS feeds can drastically reduce screen refresh rates. This is brilliant for digitising.

However, we are usually stuck with what the suppliers offer, and this may not be the optimum set up. Therefore I want your opinions on what you actually want from a WMS/WFS feed. Personally, I think I would like separate layers for rasters to set my own zooms, as I use a laptop sometimes. I also think I would like to split Mastermap into part WMS and only have the bits I trace as a WFS to keep the speed optimal. I would also like to have grayscale options. 

I also would like to dump all of my base data holdings for web services, just keeping the new vectormap local in case of emergency or disaster response. This means simply setting up blank tables to remap to if we want to still use our workspaces on mapinfo in the rare event of web outage.

How does this sound to you? - do you have different requirements? please comment to let us know.

Developing a ‘free’ customer classification system – The Alternative Approach!

Like many other Local Authorities, here in Hull we too have wrestled with the decision of whether to purchase expensive customer profiling software. The localism bill, creating a ‘bigger’ society and the need to save lots of money is certainly our immediate challenge, all to happen alongside looking after local people, meeting their needs and ensuring that our core services continue to support vulnerable people.

A deep understanding of citizens is paramount then. That was certainly the message we received at a recent customer insight conference held in London. But how?

Off the shelve products and profiling software are certainly tempting and seductive, with clever use of large national datasets and GIS mapping platform producing endless customer groupings mapped down to the lowest geographies. But after careful consideration it just wasn’t for us.

You see, Hull is unique and so are our citizens, whether it’s the Port influenced local economy (thanks to the Vikings), our ‘end of the road’ isolated location or maybe our strange love for Patties, national statistical models never seem to describe the city in the way we know it to be.

Therefore our journey of customer insight would need to be bespoke, built upon what we know already and most certainly be centred on ‘Hull’ data.

We set out on a journey to develop a customer insight data hub, collaborating mountains of data and threading them to a classification system built upon Hull’s own census data. Armed with a highly skilled team of analysts we began to re-model 45 census variables that include age, ethnicity, car ownership, housing tenure, health, employment and many more using ‘Cluster’ analysis to find natural groupings within the 250,000 census dataset. Not before long clear customer groupings were beginning to emerge as SPSS (statistical software package) did its job in differentiating people who owned their own home, lived in a terraced house, had children, worked and had 2 cars, from people who rented homes from the Council, single parents, lived in a flat or were high income earners.

10 groups were finalised, groups that at the highest level seemed to accurately describe the city into 3 hierarchies; owner occupiers, private renters and public sector renters. With the Census file for the city now ‘flagged’ with a customer group, this opened up a plethora of opportunities to learn more about these 10 groups. Mapped via ArcGIS software to census output areas, any dataset with a Hull postcode could now be added to the datafile.

Hull’s unique customer groups, mapped via ArcGIS to census output area

It took some time before the realms of possibilities kicked in. We started with matching 1 million records from our CRM system, linking every service request within the last 2 years to each customer group. We now knew for each unique customer group what they had contacted the council about (their service needs) and of course how often. We linked our property database to show where all the publicly owned assets reside in the city and mapped this to highlight where services were being over subscribed or totally under utilised. Health data was next, showing which groups were most likely to suffer from certain health problems, smoking, cancers, life expectancy. Crime data could show us which customer groups suffered which types of crime. Finally and maybe most importantly survey research data, all though smaller sample sizes showed how the different groups differ attitudinally, how they rated their neighbourhoods, local problems, satisfactions with services, and more complex issues such as their aspirations and multiple needs.

Detailed Description of one of the unique groups ‘A3’

All this based entirely for free, easily available data which most importantly is collected from Hull people, in Hull about Hull.

The work is rapidly taking off, as we present this data using inspiration from ‘information is beautiful’ which uses graphic design to present complex data and make it easy to understand. This is paramount given our audiences, whether they be community development workers, planners, senior managers or indeed members of the public, we must assume people don’t know how to interpret what we produce.

Analysis of ‘matched data’ to unique customer group A3

Initial presentations in Hull of our findings are being used to plan our long term capital and asset strategy, area and neighbourhood plans and projects, commercialise our leisure centres and theatres and most importantly provide the basis for key business intelligence to the Corporate Strategy Team, helping to underpin high level strategic decisions.

There is always another way as long as you know how!

If you would like any further info or want to see some of the work we have produced then please get in touch:

Andy Parkinson

Kingston Upon Hull City Council

e-mail: andrew.parkinson@hullcc.gov.uk

tel: 01482 613336



Guest Blogger - Steven Feldman



Last year Geo.me were in discussions with a potential partner in Local Government and the dreaded derived data question came up, something along the lines of “we’d love to work with you but …”

There still seems to be quite a lot of confusion about what data Local Government (or for that matter any public sector user of Ordnance Survey base maps) can or cannot publish using the Google Maps API. I thought that I would try to produce a simple outline of what people could and couldn’t do. Given that OS had published some new guidelines on derived data I foolishly thought it would be a fairly simple task.

After several iterations (shared with OS and Google) and some helpful input from the licensing and legal folk at OS I finally handed over a finished version to Geo.me who have published it here. I must stress that this is my view of how PSMA members can publish data using Google Maps, OS have not officially sanctioned this view although I don’t believe that they materially disagree with it (watch the comments fill up on this post). Hopefully my version is a little easier to read and understand thanthis FAQ on the PSMA web site. 

It is disappointing that we still cannot freely publish all public sector corporate geodata on top of Google Maps as part of routine business activity in the public sector. It costs the public sector and tax payers dearly in terms of usability, software license fees and infrastructure costs. Why does this continue to be a problem (particularly as OS are keen to point out that publishing on Bing Maps is OK, shame the API is less popular than Google’s and offers less usage for free)? Having spent over 3 months of wrangling, discussing etc, it seems to me that there is a lot of lawyer facing off going on here and somehow common sense is being suspended. I really don’t think Google wants to appropriate any OS IPR but OS lawyers remained stressed about their interpretation of Google’s T&C’s.

In their FAQ OS say

We have sought official clarification from Google on these points, and suggested alternative drafting that would resolve the issue from our perspective whilst, we hope, satisfying Google’s need to develop their service unencumbered for the benefit of their users. We understand that these proposals are receiving active consideration from their lawyers and we are hopeful that our recent positive engagement and experience with Google will result in mutually agreeable terms being adopted.

My response would be “Please get a move on”. There is business to be done, tax payers’ money to be saved and better public facing mapping experiences all waiting on a full resolution.

In the meantime there are loads of local government data sets that can be published using either the free or premier Maps API’s. Far be it for me to say to anyone interested in this topic “JFDI!”

Geo.me and Google are running an event for Local Government in June, you can register here. I imagine I will have a word or two to say on the subject

Free Event, 12th May in Swindon

A new event, free to all Local Public Services Officers. Check out the events pages, but please let us know if you are coming so we make sure the drinks dont run out. To keep costs right down, lunch will not be provided, but there are places to either buy food, or sitvand eat your own within 50m at the National Trust HQ, or the Great Western Outlet Centre. Hope to see you there!