Postcodes

This should be read in conjunction with sections on mapping and index of multiple deprivation.

Postcodes for patients are stored in RCPCH-Audit-Engine securely as part of the national agreement for the RCPCH Epilepsy12 clinical audit. Opt out can be requested by patients and all data with the exception of the platform unique identifier (not the NHS number or Unique Reference Number) which is retained to generate an accurate denominator.

Postcodes are used primarily to calculate indices of multiple deprivation, but are also used to provide a scatterplot for clinicians of patients in a given organisation to report maximum/minimum/mean and median distances patients have to travel for care.

Postcodes are passed to findthatpostcode.uk. This reports information against postcode which include LSOA (see Indices of Multiple Deprivation) as well as longitude and latitude. These latter data points are used for scatter plots.

Jersey is currently not supported as there is no open source solution for mapping currently though this is tracked in a github issue