Representative
About
The ONS is keen to establish a long term, small area geography policy which will be used for Census 2011 and Neighbourhood Statistics. The aim is to support the production of coherent and useful data that can be used with confidence by all organisations.
The consultation paper is available online. This describes all policy proposals, the background to them, and a number of attendant issues. Please take the time to get involved by responding to the survey and joining in the debate around the blog posts.
Latest Posts
- The consultation has now closed .........
- Consultation period ends this Friday (16th Feb)
- Do you use Output Areas?
- Don't forget the surveys
- How important are postcodes?
- Should boundaries be tied to the real world?
- Festive messages
- Health data? Ethnicity data? Do we need bigger areas?
- Consultation document
- OAs and SOAs - Stick or Twist?
OA/SOA boundaries from a health data perspective
Posted by Anonymous (not verified) on 26/01/2007 - 10:19
I work with health data and have had to adjust to using the SOA boundaries from ward boundaries. The benefit to them is that if national data is published at a consistent geograhy things can be compared. This isn't just about census data - all ONS data where possible was meant to be available at SOA level. Time series for health (and for many other areas) is really important for prioritising services.
I would like to see lower layer SOA boundaries remain the same and OA below that change to match areas. That way people can still create their own boundaries from lower layer SOA boundaries to suit their work. All organisations and services are interested in different geographical areas and this seems like a reasonable way of keeping a level of consistancy and giving people some flexibility in the areas they work with.