Sociodemographic variables for general practices: use of census data

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The family health services authority provided a database containing the age, general practice, and postcode of all 601330 patients living in Merton, Sutton, and Wandsworth and registered with 131 general practices. An enumeration district was assigned to each postcode by means of a table.2 Of the 11572 postcodes on the age-sex register, 166 could not be assigned to an enumeration district because they were not listed in the table. The 1149 patients living at these postcodes were excluded from the calculation of the census derived variables, as were the 1543 people living in importing and special enumeration districts (importing enumeration districts contain census data on people living in other enumeration districts, and census data for most special enumeration districts are suppressed). When postcodes lay in only one enumeration district (81.7% (9460) of postcodes) the value of the relevant census variable for the enumeration district was taken as the value for the postcode. When postcodes lay in more than one enumeration district (16.8% (1946) of postcodes) a weighted average of census data for the enumeration districts was taken as the value for the postcode, with the weights being the number of households in each part postcode unit.2 For each census variable we assigned a value to each patient based on their postcode. For each general practice we then calculated the average of these assigned values for the registered patients. Apart from the need to use the table, the method is similar to that described previously for electoral wards.1

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit: