Life Expectancy in Sheffield, UK

Use of GIS in public health

This page provides a simple example of how GIS can be used to visualise geographical relationships that may be contained within routine health information. We also show how methodology from spatial-epidemiology and spatial-statistics can be used to assess and measure spatial relationships within health data. In this example life-expectancy at birth for the population of Sheffield, in the UK, has been used as the health outcome.

Background

Health related outcomes such as disease prevalence and mortality can show some degree of spatial variation in which location, or geography, is a risk factor for the outcome. 

To investigate the relationship between health and location analytical techniques that are able to incorporate spatial information are used. Geographical Information Systems (GIS), spatial-epidemiology and spatial-statistics provide the scientific framework under which these types of public health issues can be investigated.

Geographical visualisation

Life-expectancy can be calculated from routine mortality and population data. Table 1 shows male and female life-expectancy at birth for each electoral ward in Sheffield. This is the average number of years that a man, or woman, would be expected to live from birth. 

The data shows that there is considerable variation across Sheffield's 28 wards. On average women living in Fulwood live 8.5 years longer than women in Burngreave. And men living in Dore and Totley are expected to live 7.6 years longer than those living in Firth Park.

Figure 1: Male life expectancy (years from birth) 

Figure 2: Female life expectancy (years from birth) 

Geographical analysis

Figure 3: Sheffield ward deprivation tertiles

Figure 4: Life expectancy vs socio-economic deprivation

Summary

Data notes