Open Data hack day - Life expectancy in Bristol

18 Feb 2013 - Kev Kirkland

About 15 people came together to look at various aspects of Bristol data as part of a HackReduce session at the weekend (South West Big Data). Here’s some charts showing life expectancy at birth gathered from Open Data released by Bristol council. The data was fetched from data.bristol.gov.uk and the Python code I used to generate the charts is included as a link in the results. Both the code and the site are a bit ugly, but represents what can be generated in a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon.

http://dataunity.github.com/bristol-open-data/HealthLifeExpectancyByWard.html

Here are some noteable observations:

• There is a difference of almost 10 years in the life expectancy of the Bristol wards (2006-2011) - from 75.6 to 85.2 years.
• Life expectancy is rising in almost all the wards.
• The wards with the lowest life expectancy are Southmead, Southville, Cabot, Lockleaze and Easton.
• The highest life expectancy is in Henleaze, Bishopston, Stoke Bishop, Clifton and Cotham.
• Easton saw a drop in life expectancy of over a year in the 2001 to 2010 periods, but recoved slightly in the 2006-2011 results.
• Hillfields saw a drop and recovery. It would be interesting to find out what caused the drop in the periods leading up to 2003-2008 and what happened to bring about a recovery.