July 15, 2009 -- NHS emergency planners in Bristol and the Avon region are developing their swine flu pandemic response strategy with spatial data from Dotted Eyes.

The work involves four primary care trusts and is part of a national drive to co-ordinate the distribution of antiviral stocks in the event of a major disease outbreak.

Dotted Eyes data has been used to identify the optimum number and locations of antiviral collection points. Key factors are population statistics and travel times to community pharmacies.

Trevor Foster, GIS Manager at the Avon IM&T Consortium, said: “We took the geographic spread of collection points and performed travel time analysis using TrafficMap, a road network dataset. We determined drive times using road speed parameters in conjunction with RouteFinder software.

“We were able to generate zones to identify how accessible the collection points were from the road network. That has allowed us to see where there is a need for more centres.”

As a direct result of the GIS support, the emergency planners have agreed the need and locations of several additional centres to bolster capacity in the Avon region. Overall capability will include community pharmacies, hospitals and other NHS sites.

Dotted Eyes Managing Director Benjamin Allan said: “This is a prime example of the power of GIS to support vital strategic decisions on resource priorities in the NHS. Presenting data in a spatial way can bring an on-the-ground scenario to life in a way that spreadsheets or narrative reports cannot.”

As well as TrafficMap, the GIS analysis has involved the postcode point product MailerMap and various scales of Dotted Eyes raster mapping including 1: 10,000 scale boundary data.

The mapping datasets are available to healthcare organisations across England through the NHS Digital Mapping Agreement, a centralised agreement between Dotted Eyes and the NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care.
For more information, see http://www.dottedeyes.com/nhs or http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/population-and-geography/nhs-digital-mapping-agreement or email Email Contact.