GIS in Environmental Health

Module code: GY7710

This module will provide a broad introduction on using GIS to study the relationship of environment and human health in the context of epidemiological studies and public health inquiry. Building on your learning outcomes from the ‘Fundamentals of GIS’ module you will gain practical experience of using GIS in both accessing existing and developing new environmental datasets, and using them to estimate health impacts. In doing so, you become familiar with a range of population and health geographies and environmental datasets, learn how to integrate them, analyse them, and undertake exposure and health risk assessment.

The lectures will provide you with the key concepts in exposure assessment, epidemiology, and risk assessment, and provide the theory and demonstrations to support the practical sessions. The practical sessions will provide the opportunity to gain experience of a handling and analysing data for a range of different environmental media and geographical scales. Examples include using distance and buffering to create exposure indicators, developing statistical methods to produce air pollution concentration surfaces, creating surfaces from point measurements of environmental hazards, undertaking population exposure assessment for different geographies (postcodes, census areas, etc.), and mapping mortality rates, diseases rates, and estimating health risks.