Graphic of a brain and four people analysing it

Health Intelligence

Providing informed analysis and interpretation to underpin decisions

Health intelligence, bringing together the latest data, information and evidence to create informed analyses, is a key underpinning to decision making and to the work we carry out in SPH. We work closely with customers at all stages, from specification to the final reporting of results, including presenting findings back to clinicians and managers.

What we do

  • Work with you to fully understand your requirements and agree the most appropriate analyses to support these
  • Where issues need clarification, for example the choice of precisely which diagnoses may be clinically appropriate to include in an analysis, our clinical experts can work with their counterparts in your organisations to establish this
  • We can match evidence with data to produce robust findings
  • Use national data sources such as SUS (Secondary Uses Service), the ONS (Office for National Statistics) and the OHID Fingertips tool
  • Collect and analyse local data sources appropriate to the project
  • Ensure all analyses comply with information governance requirements, taking advice from colleagues in the expert AGCSU Information Governance team when required
  • As our team includes clinicians and public health consultants as well as expert public health researchers, we can ensure out analyses are clinically meaningful and robust

Health intelligence is integral to many of our products such as needs assessments and evaluations, and we regularly carry out bespoke analyses for customers.

Why choose SPH?

With in-house resource, an extensive associate pool and close working with our AGCSU Business Intelligence, our strong clinical expertise and insight ensures our health intelligence is relevant and informative for your decision-making purposes.

Please get in touch via our contact page.

Case Studies

Health Needs Assessment for Children & Young People

SPH carried out a Health Needs Assessment (HNA) for a local authority that was recommissioning its Healthy Child Programme (HCP). The purpose was to review whether existing provision and service configuration of the HCP was meeting the needs of children and young people in the county, and to identify gaps and potential options for improvement.   The HCP is a preventative programme including multiple teams and agencies across the local authority, including  Health Visiting and School Nursing Services, the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) Programme, linking with childhood immunisation services, the community paediatrics team, the speech and language service, services for children with a learning disability and complex needs and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), among others.    The HNA was carried out jointly by SPH and the local authority, with the epidemiological needs assessment and service description provided by the local authority. The report was compiled using a range of publicly available and locally collected epidemiological and service use data. SPH carried out a consultation of key corporate stakeholders as well as children and young people, their parents and carers. This included semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in a range of organisations, a survey of a wider range of staff who work with children and young people and a survey of children and young people, their parents and carers which was distributed through the services.  The response to the stakeholder engagement was very good.  Rich qualitative data from this engagement complemented the quantitative data to inform the service specification for the recommissioning of these important services. 

Reviewing maternity services

As part of this review we:
  • Modelled current and future demand
  • Analysed patterns of hospital utilisation and catchment area
  • Analysed of births by place of birth, age and deprivation quintile
  • Reported on trends in risk factors for adverse outcomes from pregnancy and indicators of the quality of maternity services
  • Reported on compliance of service providers against national standards
  • Conducted interviews with local services to discuss how projected future need could be met
Testimonials