Geospatial Targeting in Public Health & Injury Prevention Programs
Healthy Way Consulting Owner & Operator, Dr. Andrew Clark, presented at the 2023 Pediatric Trauma Society Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana representing Fanshawe College and the School of Design. Check out our most recent blog post where he discusses the presentation and its connection to Pediatric Trauma.
Do you get advertisements on your mobile device as you pass a McDonalds or Tim Hortons? Do you get advertisements in your mailbox that your family in other neighbourhoods may not get? Do you see advertisements on social media that are for things that seem to be targeting you directly? These are all examples of spatially targeting messaging that helps ensure that advertisers send messages to those that the ads might be most relevant.
Did you know that public health and injury prevention experts can do the same thing to ensure their own advertising targets those that the message is most relevant? Targeting the right people, in the right places is especially important in public health and injury prevention, as there are extremely limited financial resources provided to share important messaging that can literally save lives. This is where I come in, and am able to use my expertise in GIS & Public Health to help health promoters and injury prevention specialists to utilize their budgets to geospatially target locations where the people we want to see the advertisements live, work, and play.
Over the last 12 years, I have been working with public health and injury prevention experts at Western University, London Health Sciences Centre, Middlesex London Health Unit, Southwestern Public Health, London Police Services, and the City of London to help them geospatially target where the best location is to run their projects. It has included campaigns such as encouraging seat belt use & stopping distracted driving, period of purple crying campaign, home safety program, school travel planning, Grade 5 ACT-i-Pass, among many other projects.
Case Study: Buckle Up Phone Down
Last week, I was invited to present some of this work at the Pediatric Trauma Society’s 9th Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. The conference provided the opportunity to share my experience in geospatial targeting, using the Buckle Up, Phones Down campaign that I worked on with the London-Middlesex Road Safety Committee. I presented this material on a panel called Injury Prevention Research 101: Tips on Grant Writing, Targeting, Implementing and Evaluating Injury Prevention Initiatives with a Multidisciplinary Team
Purpose. To develop an evidence-based, health promotion & media campaign focusing on the personal stories and consequences of distracted driving from Josh’s Story, an example of the real-life consequences of distracted driving. The campaign was designed to motivate protection and change knowledge, attitudes and behaviours among youth in London-Middlesex. There were two main components to the campaign: Education (e.g., social media ads, movie theatre trailer, high school student video contest, billboards & transit shelter ads) & Police Enforcement blitz.
Determining the Criteria. As the spatial analyst on the project, my job was to geospatially target (1) Locations where youth would most likely see billboard and bus shelter ads and (2) Locations where youth are most likely to be using their mobile device while driving. To do this, we conducted a literature review to identify factors that would allow us to target these key locations and a survey with a panel of experts (i.e., road safety practitioners, police, pediatricians, RNs, injury prevention specialists, researchers, and experts in media and communications) to determine the most important criteria that should be used considered to target youth in the London-Middlesex Region. The final list of criteria identified by experts included following factors:
- # of Distracted Driving Motor Vehicle Collisions
- Proximity to High Schools
- Proximity to Regional Shopping Malls
- Proximity to Intersections
- Streets with high traffic volume
- High population density of youth ages 16 to 18
Geospatial Analysis. Once the criteria were identified, I conducted a spatial analysis where each of the criteria were calculated in a Geographical Information System (GIS). Esri defines GIS as a “system that creates, manages, analyzes, and maps all types of data. GIS connects data to a map, integrating location data (where things are) with all types of descriptive information (what things are like there)” (Esri, 2023). For this analysis I started by identifying the possible billboard and bus shelter locations that we could locate our educational messaging and identify all major roads where an enforcement blitz could occur.
Next, a series of measures were created in the GIS based on the criteria identified, which can be seen in the maps above:
- Proximity measures to understand how far each billboard, bus shelter, and street segment was from a high school and regional mall;
- Traffic Volume measured by the City of London to identify streets with higher traffic volume to increase the visibility of advertisements and the number of cars that pass by where police are enforcing distracted driving laws;
- Density of Youth ages 16 to 18 years to ensure that a lot of youth live where the billboards are displayed and where the police are enforcing distracted driving laws;
- Billboards and street segments within 200-metres of a intersection, as that is where people are most likely to be distracted and so that they can see the billboards when they are stopped; and
- Locations where there have were clusters of motor vehicle collisions due to inattentive driving.
Final Results. After the measures were created, a final evaluation was conducted to identify the billboard and bus shelter locations that met the needs of the program. The educational campaign was very successful with 71% of residents having seen or heard of a distracted driving campaign and over 41% of residents having seen or heard the “Buckle Up Phone Down campaign” (n=412). We also identified the locations that provided the highest risk of distracted driving within the City of London. You can see the results in the map below, where the highest risk is identified by orange and red lines and lowest risk are grey lines. These maps were used to for 6 enforcement blitzes over a two-year period, which led to over 160 tickets and 12 warnings being issued. You can see one example of the enforcement blitz by the London Police Services in collaboration with the London Transit Commission, where officers rode a bus looking for distracted drivers.
Conclusion. GIS can be an important tool for identifying problem areas and maximizing the “bang for the buck” in public health and injury prevention work. We can target populations of where people are living using data from the census and we can target locations where people spend their time through proximity measures.
If you would like to learn more about using GIS in Public Health, you can take a Microcredential Series called GIS & Public Health, which includes instruction on this methodology in a course called Multicriteria Decision Making in GIS. Other full time programs offered in the School of Design in GIS include:
Acknowledgements. Thank you to Fanshawe College and the School of Design for funding my attendance at the conference. I would like to thank members of the London-Middlesex Roads Safety Committee for their work on this project. Without their leadership, this injury prevention program would not have happened. I would also like to thank the collaborators on the program evaluation including Professor Jason Gilliland (PhD) from Western University’s Human Environments Analysis Laboratory and Epidemiologist Tanya Charyk-Stewart from London Health Sciences Centre’s Trauma Program. A full write-up of the project can be found in the Journal of Trauma & Acute Care Surgery.