Maps and Deprivation

The Dashboard Map¶

The NPDA dashboard includes an interactive map showing the geographic distribution of patients registered with your paediatric diabetes unit (PDU). Each dot represents a patient whose postcode has been successfully validated, and hovering over a dot displays:

A patient identifier (NHS number or Unique Reference Number)
The straight-line distance from the patient's home postcode to the PDU lead centre (in miles and kilometres)
The patient's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) quintile, if known

A summary footer shows the mean, minimum and maximum travel distances across all mapped patients.

What is the Index of Multiple Deprivation?¶

The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) is the official measure of relative deprivation used across the UK. It summarises social and economic conditions in small geographic areas, and is published separately for each of the four devolved nations.

How it is calculated¶

The UK is divided into small statistical units of roughly comparable population size:

England and Wales — Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs), each containing approximately 400–3,000 households
Scotland — Data Zones
Northern Ireland — Super Output Areas (SOAs)

Each unit is scored across several deprivation domains. The domains differ slightly between nations:

Domain	England	Wales	Scotland	Northern Ireland
Income	✓	✓	✓	✓
Employment	✓	✓	✓	✓
Education	✓	✓	✓	✓
Health	✓	✓	✓	✓
Crime	✓	✓	✓	✓
Barriers to housing / services	✓	✓	✓	✓
Living environment	✓	✓	—	—
Access to services	—	✓	✓	✓
Community safety	—	✓	—	—
Physical environment	—	✓	—	—

The domain scores are weighted and combined into a single IMD score for each area. Areas are then ranked from most to least deprived and divided into quantiles — commonly deciles (10 groups) or quintiles (5 groups). Quintile 1 is the most deprived; quintile 5 is the least deprived.

IMD scores are not comparable across countries

Because each nation calculates its index independently, a quintile 2 in England is not the same as a quintile 2 in Wales or Scotland. Comparisons should only be made within a single nation.

Datasets and Boundaries¶

The IMD datasets used vary by country and publication year. The table below summarises the datasets held in the RCPCH Census Platform that power deprivation lookups in this platform:

Country	Index	IMD Year	Area unit	Boundary era	Local Authority era
England	IoD	2019	LSOA	2011	2019
England	IoD	2025	LSOA	2021	2024
Wales	WIMD	2019	LSOA	2011	2019
Scotland	SIMD	2020	Data Zone	2011	2011
Northern Ireland	NIMDM	2017	SOA	2001	—

How NPDA Uses IMD¶

The NPDA platform looks up the IMD quintile for each patient whose postcode has been successfully validated. The lookup is country-aware: a patient in Wales is looked up against the Welsh IMD (WIMD), a patient in Scotland against the Scottish IMD (SIMD), and so on.

For England, the dataset year used depends on the audit period:

Audit period	England IMD dataset
2024–2025 and earlier	IoD 2019 (2011 LSOA boundaries)
2025–2026 and later	IoD 2025 (2021 LSOA boundaries)

This ensures that the most appropriate and up-to-date deprivation data is used as new datasets are published.

The quintile is stored against each patient record and displayed on:

The dashboard map tooltip for each patient
The patient report, where it can be used to explore the relationship between deprivation and clinical outcomes

Lookups are performed at the point of postcode validation during CSV upload, and can be recalculated in bulk by a system administrator using the recalculate_imd management command.