Developing and disseminating tools for population health improvement: an online interactive atlas for identifying environmental change

The UK has some of the world’s best longitudinal data on individuals and their health but, in contrast, longitudinal data on built and physical environments are poor and hard to access for the non-expert. This matters because the environment is an important determinant of health.

The MRC/CSO Social & Public Health Sciences Unit have developed an atlas of built and physical environment change from Ordnance Survey (OS) data but this is currently for Scotland only, offers a narrow range of environmental attributes and lacks ‘off-the-shelf’ measures of both environment and change which would make it more useful for the public, policy makers, planners and those evaluating the impacts of environmental interventions on health and health inequalities.

The project aims to add to tools for population health improvement by collating, enhancing and sharing easy-to-use information capturing change in the built and physical environment over time, at fine spatial scale for the whole of Great Britain, in order to link data to changes in health and/or health-related behaviours and to evaluate the impacts of environmental interventions on health, behaviour and inequalities.