CACI UK | Giving large retailers detailed insight to help them find the right location and promote their stores effectively

Background

CACI offers a range of marketing solutions and information systems to local and central government and to businesses from most industry sectors. Its location planning experts provide advice in a number of areas from retail development opportunities, shopping centre asset management and town centre regeneration to catchment areas and consumer segmentation.

Steve Halsall is a consulting partner at CACI and heads up the Property Consulting Group (PCG). He has been with CACI for two years and was brought in to help evolve its well-established offer in this area. His team works across the public sector and commercial sector (including shopping centre owners, investors, developers and agents) providing advice on retail or leisure-led developments.

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Helping Health Ltd. – ‘Giving pharmaceutical companies the ability to make strategic decisions about sales and marketing based on market intelligence’

Helping health was set up in 2009 to provide pharmaceutical companies, who are looking to launch a new drug or revitalise a brand, with the intelligence and insight they need to align their sales and marketing effort to local need. The Helping Health team has distilled over 40 years of experience to ensure that the move to a patient-led NHS can be turned into opportunities for healthcare brands.

The company was set up in 2009 by Duncan and Cathy Alexander. Duncan says Helping Health collects data at local organisation level, either directly from PCTs, or other commissioning organisations. He wanted to find a way of displaying the information to show how one organisation was performing compared to another in a given disease area.

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Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, UK (CIPFA) | Case Study

The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), is the professional body for people in public finance. It has 14,000 members working throughout public services, national audit agencies, major accountancy firms and other bodies where public money needs to be effectively and efficiently managed.

Chris Greene is Head of Information Services at CIPFA. Part of his team’s responsibility is the collection of local government data across a multitude of services, including financial, staffing, activity and performance information from all UK local authorities. This data is analysed to help local authorities better manage their resources.

The traditional approach has been to present the information in hard copy publications, which later evolved to include spreadsheets. However, Chris and his team were looking for something more “cutting edge” that would allow them to present data in a useful format.

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National Institute for Health and Welfare Finland

Background

The National Institute for Health and Welfare Finland (THL) is a research and development institute under the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. THL serves broader society, the scientific community and decision-makers in central government and municipalities. Its aim is to promote health and welfare inFinland. Within THL there is a Department of Health, Functional Capacity and Welfare. Its work focuses on the most important public health issues, their determinants and monitoring the health of the population and population subgroups.

The department conducts research and development work with a broad collaborative of partners to promote the health and functional capacity of Finnish people and to enhance health monitoring among population subgroups also at local area level.

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Consumer Credit Counselling Service

Background

The Foundation for Credit Counselling, based in Leeds, is a registered charity which was set up to assist people in financial difficulty by providing free, impartial and realistic debt advice. The Foundation for Credit Counselling is the umbrella charity for Consumer Credit Counselling Service (CCCS) in theUnited Kingdom. Through its free national telephone service, ten regional centres and online CCCS Debt Remedy, CCCS is able to help people with debt problems wherever they live. CCCS is continually looking for new ways to raise awareness of its services and its data is an important resource for its promotions.

 

Getting started

CCCS felt that data such as the number of people seeking its help would be a good way to highlight the pattern of debt in the UK, which would be of interest to the media and politicians. Presenting the data in an easy-to-understand format would be helpful for the media and the public.

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NISRA – Using data presentation to get detailed insight on health and social inequalities to a wide range of users

Background

The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) is the principal source of official statistics and social research on Northern Ireland’s population and socio-economic conditions. NISRA has developed an information service (Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Information Service) http://www.ninis.nisra.gov.uk to provide access to statistical and geographical data relating to small areas across Northern Ireland. Information is available across a range of themes including population, social and welfare, agriculture & education.

Getting started

We spoke to Cathryn McBurney at NISRA to find out how it is using data presentation to get information to the right people in a format that is easy to interpret. Cathryn explains that part of NINIS is dedicated to the ten-year ‘Investing for Health’ strategy which started in 2002. Initially health and well-being indicators were collected and presented mostly within spreadsheets and area profile fact sheets. However, with a wide range of users, and with the increase in the number of years collected for each dataset, it was felt that a new approach should be used and NISRA decided to use InstantAtlas to create a series of interactive maps around each theme.

“Investing for Health is about improving health and reducing inequalities – it is a framework with two major goals and seven objectives covering the broad determinants of health, from obvious health indicators such as access to health care, to the effects of crime and poor education.”

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Florida Department of Health – ‘Improving access to vast amounts of data in a visually-compelling format’

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St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council – ‘Helping non-expert and professional users understand a wide range of data for neighbourhood needs assessment’

Background

St. Helens Together is the Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) for St. Helens Metropolitan Borough Council. The LSP is a voluntary body that provides a forum where the needs of the local community can be highlighted and services designed accordingly. The LSP is currently focusing on five key themes: children and young people; communities and neighbourhoods; economic development and enterprise; healthier communities and older people and safer communities.

We spoke to Catherine Fletcher, Intelligence and Partnerships Manager, Policy and Partnerships, St. Helens Council, about the LSP’s information needs and how they are being met.

Catherine explains that the Local Area Agreement was a catalyst for sharing information between LSP partners and the next step was to gain a better understanding of neighbourhood needs. The partners therefore started looking at a way of presenting data that could work alongside the existing systems they had in place. “Our next step was geographical data presentation because we had got to the point where we were good at sharing information but we then needed to understand it,” says Catherine.

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6.5.0: A feature-packed new version of InstantAtlas Desktop

Hi! This is the first support team contribution to the InstantAtlas blog and I hope that our posts will provide a useful and perhaps alternative perspective on our products. Supporting InstantAtlas is never dull; the tools are constantly evolving and our customers continue to push boundaries and apply the software in innovative ways to display geo-statistical data.

There are so many topics to blog about but I would like to kick things off with a reminder to download the latest version of InstantAtlas Desktop, which was released Monday 9^th April.  The support team invest a great deal of time and effort in each and every release and we feel 6.5.0 is a winner!

This release is feature-packed; it contains a brand new template (the Double Base Layer template), several new components (Pyramid Chart, Google Search, Dot Plot) and a raft of other enhancements (GeoRSS contextual layers, custom point icons, dynamic table columns, etc). You can read more here:

http://www.instantatlas.com/downloads/IAD650ReleaseNotes.pdf

I am confident that version 6.5.0 will allow users to continue to break new ground in the exploration and presentation of their geo-statistical data. Please get hold of the new version and let us know what you think!

Pierre Jenkins, Head of InstantAtlas Support

‘How Liverpool PCT is using data presentation to improve access to its Joint Strategic Needs Assessment’

Background

Liverpool primary care trust is leading 2020 Decade of Health and Wellbeing for the Liverpool City region. The PCT’s vision is to achieve transformational improvements in health and in service provision and significant reductions in health inequalities.

The PCT’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) helps commissioners get a better understanding of current and future the health, care and well-being needs of people in Liverpool, and is produced jointly between the Primary Care Trust and City Council.

Colin Wilson, Intelligence Analyst Liverpool PCT, says the PCT wanted to display the JSNA data in a more engaging way – previously it had presented the data in tables and reports that were made available on the website.

Getting started

The Joint Health Unit (a collaboration between Liverpool PCT and Liverpool City Council) decided to use InstantAtlas to present the JSNA in a visually-compelling format. The unit pulled in data from various sources including: mortality rates; life expectancy; percentage of smokers; cancer related deaths and education data (GCSE passes).

Meeting the need

Colin believes that once the JSNA reports go live they will be very useful for anyone involved in commissioning services, such as GP consortia. “The JSNA report is aimed at anyone who has an interest in service delivery, such as health and social care organisations, the voluntary sector and partner agencies such as the Police.

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