What we do and why:

Services:

The team at nkm provide the following distinct services:

• High quality consultancy and analytical services in health and social care, education, housing and crime, and cross cutting combinations of each
• Exploitation and linkage of local administrative data for use in a range of different local applications
• Expert advice and consultancy using own administrative data for service development, resource allocation, health needs assessments, policy and planning and public health initiatives
• Up-to-date population estimation and segmentation down to household level or to any desired geography
• Software services for data linking and matching to other administrative data and to surveys
• Economic analysis and operations research

In addition nkm is underpinned by a range of powerful analytical tools including GIS and presentational outputs that are simple to assimilate and valued by clients. nkm advises and assists on any aspect of data sharing and linking information within and between organisations. This can include data sources, their content and quality, data cleaning and matching. We customise our service to each client’s needs. Clients include Local Authorities, Primary Care Trusts, central government and other mainly public sector organisations. For examples of briefings see our case studies which provide synopses of recent assignments.

How nkm contributes to government initiatives:

nkm has contributed to a wide range of local and government initiatives including the following (see also links on the right of the page):

• Joint strategic needs analysis
• Place shaping
• Neighbourhood renewal
• Equality impact assessment
• Partnerships for Older People Projects POPP
• World Class Commissioning
• Choosing Health
• Local Area Agreements
• National Indicators for Local Strategic Partnerships
• Building a Society for All Ages

Why is administrative data better than official sources?

Official statistics are of limited value at a local level because:

• geographical boundaries can change
• spatial units are inappropriate or inflexible
• data may be out of date or not relevant
• data are not disaggregate enough
• data cover only a limited range
• data cannot be linked to other local information
• data cannot be linked to surveys

nkm overcomes these challenges by using current, household level, local administrative data from different organisations. The data is standardised to a property gazetteer and cross-referenced, creating a powerful up-to-date database of every household in your area. This means that the data can fit exactly into any spatial unit.

Examples of applications (see case studies):

• Data sharing and management
• Population counts by age and sex at the neighbourhood level
• Strategic needs assessment and evaluation
• Equality impact assessments
• Ethnicity assignment
• Access to local services
• Regeneration
• Well being and life expectancy
• Deprivation
• Child care sufficiency
• Community safety
• Older peoples services
• Chronic disease management (see report)
• Teenage pregnancy
• Language and children
• Educational attainment
• Policy analysis and evaluation
• Health Impact Analysis
• Data sharing and management

How nkm works:

nkm sets up a data sharing environment with all partners and arranges data sharing protocols. All procedures are Data Protection compliant. Any data taken offsite is collected in person or by secure email or ftp, encrypted and stored in a secure environment. A typical application involving the creation of a household level data base, and then applying it to one or two local services takes about 4 months in elapsed time. For organisations that are already using nkm, turnaround can be as quick as a few days depending on the scope of the assignment.

We also offer 3 licenced software products that automate the main procedures in our methodology: address matching and risk ladders.

Please contact nkminfo@googlemail.com for information