NEIGHBOURHOOD PROFILE · Methodology

Neighbourhood Profile

Tower Hamlets

Geography

Tower Hamlets

111 region

LONDON COMMISSIONING REGION

Site context: Tower Hamlets · NHS Region (for 111): LONDON COMMISSIONING REGION

RegionICBBoroughPCN

The pipeline

From a national publication to a PCN-grain number, in five steps

1
Harvest the publication
Each NHS / public-health open-data release (GPAD, workforce, A&E, 111, CBT, OCS, registered list, QOF & payments, urgent community response, OHID Fingertips, ONS population, IoD2025 deprivation, the LSOA catchment spine) is fetched from its official page by a verified URL/CSV pattern — no scraping of unstable HTML where a stable file exists.
2
Map through ODS
Practice ODS codes are joined to PCN, sub-ICB, ICB and NHS Region via the Organisation Data Service tree, so GP-side data rolls up to the PCN and 111 resolves to the patient’s Region honestly.
3
Idempotent load
Rows are upserted on a natural key (e.g. odsCode + month), never blindly inserted — re-running a load is safe and produces the same result, so a re-publication or a re-run never double-counts.
4
Derive rates & relationships
Shares, per-1,000 rates and FTE ratios are computed by pure, unit-tested functions — the same code the tabs render and the test suite pins — so every number is reproducible and divide-by-zero safe.
5
Stamp freshness & refresh
Each metric shows the month it is computed for; the loaders re-run on the publication cadence so the profile tracks the latest available open data.

Sources

Every figure traces to an official NHS or public-health open-data release

Activity & access (GP-side, monthly)
GP appointments (GPAD), online consultations (OCS), telephony (CBT), registered list size — practice grain, rolled up through ODS.
Workforce & funding
GP and PCN/ARRS workforce (NWRS), QOF achievement & prevalence, NHS Payments to General Practice.
Urgent & community care
A&E attendances (England), NHS 111 (region), 2-hour Urgent Community Response (ICB), ambulance response times, LD annual health checks.
Population & public health
ONS mid-year resident population by age/sex (Local-Authority grain); registered-patient age/sex bands (GpRegisteredAgeSex, GP-practice grain); OHID Fingertips for life expectancy, ethnicity and smoking/obesity prevalence.
Small-area spine & deprivation
The LSOA catchment spine — practice × LSOA registered patients (GpRegisteredLsoa), IoD2025 deprivation (ImdLsoa) and LSOA boundaries (LsoaBoundary) — feeds the catchment-weighting layer: IoD2025 is published natively on 2021 LSOAs, the same geography as the registered-patient catchment, so it is matched directly (no vintage bridge) and folded onto each practice, weighted by where its registered patients actually live.

Deprivation is read one way across the profile: a single catchment-weighted IoD2025 method (each scope’s registered patients’ mean small-area deprivation), so the Population tile, the patient-deprivation panel, the Overview cover, the cross-tab context strip and the deprivation-gradient scatter all agree.

How current is the data?

How current is the data? National open data runs roughly 6–8 weeks in arrears — a given month’s figures are published a month or two after the month ends. Some sources are quarterly or annual (workforce cuts, QOF), so not every tab moves every month.

This is by design a complement to, not a replacement for, the weekly EMIS feed in core PCND: the Neighbourhood Profile gives the population-level, cross-service picture that weekly practice data cannot, while the EMIS feed gives the timeliness that national open data cannot.

Caveats

Grain limits: A&E is published at provider/trust grain with no clean region link, so it is shown at ENGLAND level only and never attributed to a PCN. NHS 111 is published at national and region grain only, so it is shown at the patient’s NHS Region (with England as a comparator) and never below it. Only GP-side data (appointments, list size, telephony, online consultations, workforce) is attributed to the PCN.

Status flags: GPAD, CBT and OCS are “official statistics in development”; ARRS / PCN-workforce figures are management information (NWRS). Treat trends as indicative while these methods mature.

Correlation, not causation: where the profile shows series together (e.g. GP demand alongside 111 and A&E on the Community tab), movement in one is not evidence it caused movement in another. The view is for triangulation, not attribution.

Licence: all source data is NHS open data under the Open Government Licence (OGL).