Launching our updated Urban Health Index

At Impact on Urban Health, we explore new innovative ideas that can help us get closer to achieving health equity.

Two years ago, we launched our first Urban Health Index (UHI). This brought together a set of metrics that helped us understand the social and environmental factors that shape the health and wellbeing of the population living in Lambeth and Southwark.

The UHI can help us understand the needs of neighbourhoods in Lambeth and Southwark, and where our projects can make a greater impact.

We have now updated our index and in the process, implemented changes following consultation with key stakeholders:

• We refreshed all the indicators for which an update of the data was available
• We strengthened the model by including or replacing some indicators
• We refreshed the look and feel of the interactive scorecard
• We calculated an additional index for wards in Lambeth and Southwark

Updates we’ve made

To update the UHI, we reviewed the underlying indicators:.

• updating those for which a more recent time period was made available – over 50% of the underlying indicators have been updated
• replacing those discontinued from the source with others where relevant – e.g. Deaths under 65 has been replaced with deaths under 75
• bringing in new indicators to strengthen the index – e.g. Greenspace coverage added to strengthen the Environmental quality component of the Index.

These changes, in particular the addition of newly available indicators, strengthen the Index overall. However, this means the updated UHI is not directly comparable to the earlier version.

While a change over time analysis in not possible for the UHI as a whole we can see that the neighbourhoods of ‘Herne Hill and Dulwich Park’ and ‘Brixton North’ continue to be the neighbourhoods that experience the best and worst social and environmental outcomes respectively according to their ranking in the index. Although not geographically very far apart, they have very different levels of needs. Brixton North ranks 68/68 and it is in the bottom quintile for most of the underlying measures, Herne Hill ranks 1/68 and it is in the bottom quintile for just a handful of measures.