Geospatial Information for the Health Sector

Ms. Elizabeth O'Keeffe, Land Victoria

Land Victoria is the government business responsible for geospatial information policy and key datasets and has a whole of Government role in ensuring the take-up of GI opportunities in Victoria. The health sector is arguably the foremost area to benefit from the application of GIS. This presentation provides a brief overview of the major reforms Land Victoria has undertaken to improve the integration of GI datasets and the ease of access to Government land information and services, and further outlines Land Victoria's vision for developing new geospatial information and data technologies to enable innovative tools which can be applied to the management and application of geospatial information in the health sector.

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Applications of Geographic Information Science to identify and evaluate areas of high infant mortality rate

Professor Gerard Rushton, Department Geography, and Adjunct Professor
Department of Preventive Medicine & Environmental Health, The University of Iowa, U.S.A.

Maps of infant mortality rates for small areas are statistically unstable and are not a reliable basis for planning programs that target specific areas in which to reduce infant mortality rates. Since records from registries can now be address-matched directly, maps based on spatial filters provide a more reliable basis for such planning. These ideas will be illustrated with results of spatial analyses of infant mortality and birth records in Des Moines, Iowa; a North American Metropolitan area of approximately 300,000 people. Then, the method used will be generalised for application to any contingent based health or disease event where the population at risk and disease cases can be measured at either the level of the individual or for aggregations of individuals in small areas. This generalisation of the approach will be illustrated from spatial analyses of choices of breast cancer therapies in Iowa.

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Implementing a G.I.S. for Divisions of General Practice in Victoria

Ms. Julie Green and Dr. Francisco Escobar

Centre for Community Child Health & Ambulatory Paediatrics, and Department of Geomatics, ‘Geographic Information Systems for General Practice’ Research Team

This Project, now in its final design implementation and evaluation stages, was originally funded by the General Practice Unit, Department of Human Services with the support of Land Victoria. A research team has, in consultation with East Gippsland and North West Melbourne Divisions of General Practice, developed a G.I.S. for use by the two divisions. This presentation will address key issues in the development of the GIS and will demonstrate queries and analysis of the information system. Issues pertaining to multiple boundaries, GIS user education, and evaluation of the implementation will also be outlined.

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G.I.S. as a tool to identify demand for welfare services and plan for delivery of those services

Mr. Andrew Plunkett, Family and Children's Services, Perth, W.A.

The implementation and operation of a Geographic Information System (GIS) within the department has its origins an the initial need to describe geographically who is responsible for what areas. The capacity of GIS to integrate disparate datasets became obvious from somewhat humble origins in 1991.

The growth in datasets within the GIS has been matched by the increasing functionality and productivity of both software and source data systems, both internal departmental systems and external suppliers such as ABS Cdata 91, and 96.

The ability to integrate data which is available at street address level , suburb and postcode levels and consider it within a single geographic based framework, provides a unique perspective which allows and encourages a 'new view' of existing data. This new view has facilitated new perspectives on where demand is currently located, where demand is likely to come from in the future and social and locational factors which lead to concentrations of demand for services.

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Two Examples of the Application of Geographic Information Systems in Drug Research

Dr. Greg Rumbold, Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, Fitzroy, Victoria.

This presentation describes the use of GIS in two drug research projects: An analysis of patterns of alcohol consumption and related harms within Victoria and study of heroin overdose across metropolitan Melbourne using ambulance records.

Findings from these two studies will be used as examples to demonstrate the issues and problems encountered in the application of GIS in drug research. The issues discussed will include the selection of an appropriate unit of analysis, confidentiality issues, the quality of data, and representing error or uncertainty in maps. Finally conclusions will be drawn regarding the possibilities and constraints of using GIS in drug research.

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GIS for Health in Australia without the building blocks; are we missing the point?

Dr. John Glover, South Australian Health Commission

Atlases describing the distribution of the population by socioeconomic characteristics and patterns of health service use and health status in Australia were first produced in 1990. The use of maps has been an effective tool to draw attention to associations that exist between the distribution of these indicators of population health. A few examples from the second editions of the recent South Australian & the forthcoming Australian social health atlases illustrate the power of this approach.

With work now underway on a second edition of the Australian Social Health Atlas (using data from the early to mid-90s, raising the possibility of comparisons with the first edition reporting data from the mid to late 1980s), the lack of a common, uniform standard to which spatial data in Australia can be coded has become critical. The paper addresses the inability to effectively integrate the postcode of residence (for which a vast array of administrative information is available) with the Statistical Local Area (SLA), the basic spatial unit used by the national statistical agency (the ABS) yet over which it has no effective control. Using the situation in Victoria as an example, it describes the effects on attempts at comparison resulting from changes in SLA boundaries.

The paper concludes with a commentary on the lack of leadership in this area in Australia, & a call for a combined approach to address this increasingly important issue.

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