This project aims to represent the General Practitioners and General Practices data in England by representing them in the map at postcode district level.
Interact with the tableau dashboard in this link: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/mohamed.abdul.hakkam.ansar.ali.khan/viz/EnglandHealthDatabyPostcodeRegion/Dashboard1
Background
Currently, there is a shortage of GPs to care for the increasing and ageing population of England. According to the Royal College of General Practitioners there has been a crisis of General Practitioners in England and each GP is looking after 2056 patients which is double the amount of WHO’s recommended doctor to patient ratio of 1000:1 [1]. In this project we explore the areas where there is a shortage of GPs and areas where there is a more than required amount of GPs through tableau.
Data
The data used to carry out this project were collected from various sources listed below:
GP surgeries data: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/patients-registered-at-a-gp-practice
General Practices and General Practitioners data: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/general-and-personal-medical-services/31-august-2023
Census data at postcode level: https://geoportal.statistics.gov.uk/datasets/60484ad9611249b59f3644e92f37476d/about
Data Integration
The data was already cleaned and ready to be used. So it was just needed to be integrated. The primary unique identifier used to link all the data was the practice code of the GP practice. The postcode of the practice was split to extract the postcode district. The census data and the practice data was linked using right join with postcode district. A completed dataset looked liked this.
This dataset was used to visualize them in the map of England using tableau.
Visualization
The tableau datasource was connected to this completed dataset. The latitudes and longitudes were generated using the postcode districts column. The postcodes were then plotted in the map using map function.
A new calculated field called patients per GP was created to calculate the GP to patients ratio. This ratio was then binned with the size of 500. This binning was then dragged into the colors function to represent the Patient per GP in each postcode.
The areas with GP to patient ratio lower than the WHO’s recommended ratio are marked in green. The ratios in between 1:1000 to 1:2000 are marked in blue. And the ones having more than 2000 are marked in red.
The dashboard was then decided to be interacted using filters where users can see the various information like total population, total patients registered, number of GP surgeries, etc., on a district or county.
Inferences
Majority of the areas in England are between the ratios of 1:1000 to 1:2000. The major cities London, Birmingham and Leeds have higher shortages of GP than the rest of the regions.