Geographical disparities in health present important research and policy challenges. Disparities can be indicative of different forms of spatially patterned advantage or disadvantage. Local age and sex-standardised hospital admissions rates can provide insights into health disparities and may act as input into health geographic research or local policy instruments, such as Joint Area Health Needs Assessments (JSNAs).

This dataset has age and sex-standardised morbidity rates for 27 categories of health conditions at the level of MSOAs for the financial years 1999/00 – 2013/14. It will be possible to study patterns and evolutions of geographical health disparities at a high spatial resolution.

Variables include:

• Middle Layer Super Output Area (2011)
• financial year 1999/00 – 2013/14, a financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March
• health condition (remains the same in each table)
• observed counts of cases (disclosure controlled, values between 1 and 7 suppressed, rounded to nearest 5 where values are 8 or greater
• Age- and sex-standardised Standardised Morbidity Rate (crude), 2001 England population used as standard population
• Standardised Morbidity Rate 95% CI lower bound
• Standardised Morbidity Rate 95% CI upper bound
• spatially smoothed Age- and sex-standardised Standardised Morbidity Rate using BYM model according to Besag et al 1991. Further details to be published soon.
• spatially smoothed Age- and sex-standardised Standardised Morbidity Rate 95% CI lower bound
• spatially smoothed Age- and sex-standardised Standardised Morbidity Rate 95% CI upper bound

The data represent in-patient data for HES. HES has near-complete coverage of NHS commissioned hospital admissions in England. Coding of diagnoses may vary in consistency but has been validated for research and auditing purposes in an earlier study. The estimates only related to events recorded in a hospital setting. They do not include out-patient data, events recorded in primary care and data on self-rated health.

Please see the attached data profile for further details.