SHAPE up your population health management

Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust has been using SHAPE to assist with population health management for several years.

The Trust’s Business Intelligence Lead, Helen Jones, is an expert in analysing population health and a Core20Plus ambassador, and says SHAPE is one of the systems that has been invaluable in improving health outcomes across the region.

“In Shropshire, we have two incredibly distinct communities, with big health inequalities” she said. “Telford and Wrekin has a younger, urban population, with good public transport access, but includes communities with high levels of deprivation. Shropshire, on the other hand, is relatively affluent, with an older, rural population, with a few smaller pockets of deprivation.”

In Telford, life expectancy at birth for men and women is significantly worse than the England average, whereas in Shropshire, it’s significantly better. These health inequalities mean that Helen and her colleagues at Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust find tools such as SHAPE invaluable to target their clinical services and promotion.

Targeting health inequalities

Locating vaccination hubs

The first time Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust used SHAPE to target health inequalities was during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID Vaccination Services team used SHAPE Place, which is free to use for the public sector, to plan COVID-19 vaccination clinic locations across the region. They utilised the travel time and distances information available in SHAPE to ensure that vaccination sites were located in accessible places which could benefit the maximum number of people across their catchment area.

The results from this project were so encouraging that the Trust decided to set up their own SHAPE Local – a private, confidential workspace to which they could upload their own data in order to create bespoke functionality.

Improving healthcare

Serving our veterans

Improving healthcare for armed forces veterans is one of the commitments NHS England made in its Long Term Plan. However, as serving armed forces personnel, veterans and their families often move around the country, it can be difficult to track them, they have contact with multiple Trusts, and they can end up on the bottom of waiting lists, or their children can be called in for vaccinations more than once.

Shropshire have been using SHAPE to track the number of veterans in the area, using this to build up the ‘bigger picture’ of where veterans are located and what services they can access. (See banner image for the map that supported this)

Encouraging SHAPE advocates throughout the Trust

As well as using SHAPE herself, Helen Jones has been supporting others to access its potential throughout the Trust.

She has been demonstrating SHAPE in operational workshops with staff throughout the Trust and with peers at ICBs, showcasing how the system can be used to monitor and improve health inequalities.

During the workshops, she’s been explaining SHAPE basics, such as how to find Core20 populations and how to add GPs to the map. She then set tasks for participants to find the answer to questions using SHAPE.

Helen Jones, Business Intelligence Lead

"Things just leap out at you!"

Helen said: “The value of SHAPE is the way it can visualise the information for you. Things just leap out at you that you wouldn’t normally see if you were looking at figures on a page.

“If I can give SHAPE users one piece of advice, it’s that you should join the SHAPE Community, if you have chance. It’s a great way to learn more about what other people are doing with SHAPE, to share your own best practice, and to give feedback for how the platform should be developed in future.”

Discover more about SHAPE

If you’d like to discover more about SHAPE, and then ways other people are using it, why not join our SHAPE Community? The SHAPE Community is a user group of SHAPE fans who give feedback and test products ahead of roll out. It enables you to help direct the future development of SHAPE, and also allows you to talk with other SHAPE users about how they use SHAPE.

Become a member of the SHAPE Community now

"The value of SHAPE is the way it can visualise the information. Things just leap out at you that you wouldn’t normally see if you were looking at figures on a page."

Helen Jones, Business Intelligence Lead, Shropshire Community Health Trust