Area classification for health areas - cluster summaries
This classification groups health areas into clusters based on similar characteristics. The classification has been constructed by assigning health areas to the local authority classification (more detail on this can be found in the methods paper.) The largest cluster is the supergroup - there are eight of these. Each supergroup is further split into groups (13 in total) and further into subgroups (24 in total).
Each of these downloadable pdf files contains statistical summaries of the supergroup and its constituent groups and subgroups. Each summary highlights the main socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the clusters in the collection.
The summaries have been created by listing the variables that meet certain definitions for 'far below average', 'far above average' and 'close to the average' (see footnote). The variables have been listed in ascending order of distance from the UK mean, so the first variable mentioned as being below the UK mean is furthest below the UK mean, and the last variable mentioned as being above the UK mean is the furthest above the UK mean.
Greater variation can be seen in the summaries that contain London health areas, that is, the supergroups London Suburbs, London Central and London Cosmopolitan. These have larger differences from the UK mean so these supergroups have more variables in the far above/below categories whereas other cluster groups have fewer variables in the far above/below categories but more in the 'close to the average' category.
The "most typical" and "least typical" health areas for each cluster were chosen on the basis of similarity (distance) to the average characteristics (centroid) of the cluster. The distance from every local authority to the cluster centroid indicates how similar it is to the cluster. See Distance from Centroids for values and more information.
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