Mapping choice in the NHS

Editor—Living in the north of England, I was drawn to the article by Damiani et al on mapping choice in the NHS by the large red patches on the maps that covered what I think of as my local area.¹ Large areas of the north of England seem to be an unacceptably long travelling time from the nearest hospital.

However, looking a little closer I realised that large hospitals at Ashington, South Shields, Carlisle, Hexham, Whitehaven, Barrow, Lancaster, and Preston are missing from the map. This lack of accuracy on hospital locations in the part of the country that I know makes me worry about the accuracy of hospital locations plotted in the rest of the country.

The authors say that they obtained the postcodes of all NHS trusts dealing with acute conditions. I suspect that they may have obtained a list of postcodes of trust headquarters. Unfortunately, this is an extremely inaccurate method of locating hospitals, particularly when some trusts are responsible for several acute hospitals that are many miles apart.

I remember being taught that any analysis is only as good as the data on which it is based. In this article, a potentially interesting analysis seems to be based on fundamentally flawed data on hospital locations. I only hope (for the sake of all who work in the NHS north of Watford) that policy makers do not base decisions about our long term future on similar data.