Institute of Australian Geographers
Health Geography Study Group
Newsletter March 2016
https://www.iag.org.au//study-groups/health-geography-study-group/
The growth of health geography
We have seen our mailing list increase from 17 when we started the group in 2014 to 37 in 2016. We are
now looking at building this into one of the strongest study groups within the IAG. At this point we would
also like to acknowledge a prior Health Geography Study Group formed by Lisel O’Dwyer in 2001.
To maximise the opportunity the current group provides, we invite you to:
1.
Attend our workshop on the 28th of June in Adelaide prior to the IAG Annual Meeting (details will
follow in subsequent email); please email ideas for what you would like to see in this workshop to
[email protected]
2.
Nominate the Health Geography session when submitting your IAG abstract: https://
kaigi.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/iag-2016/info/ExtraContent/ContentPage2
3.
Share details of this study group with your colleagues;
4.
Become a member of the IAG and the Health Geography Study Group;
5.
Profile yourself and your work the Health Geography Study Group website: https://www.iag.org.au/
study-groups/health-geography-study-group/hgeogdirectory/
6.
Send content you want profiled in the Health Geography Study Group newsletter to Lukar
Thornton: [email protected]
International Geographical Union Commission on Health and Environment
http://www.iguhep.org/
The International Geographical Union's Commission on Health and Environment (IGU CHE) comprises of
scientist and professionals in the fields of Health Geography, Environment and Public Health (HEP).
Researcher's Network of the IGU CHE
http://www.healthgeography.org/
The IGU CHE has initialized a Researcher Network to further stimulate and support international networking
and exchange on health geography, global health, public health and environment and health issues. The researcher network aims to encourage participation by researchers of all age groups with special focus on enlarging participation of young researchers to ensure the sustainability of the commission for the future.
Key journals
Health & Place
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/health-and-place/
The journal is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the study of all aspects of health and health care in
which place or location matters.
If anyone has Health & Place enquires, Robin Kearns is happy to be the Australasian point of contact as an
Associate Editor: [email protected]
International Journal of Health Geographics
https://ij-healthgeographics.biomedcentral.com/
International Journal of Health Geographics covers a wide range of interdisciplinary geospatial topics in a
health/healthcare context, from spatial data infrastructure and Web geospatial interoperability research,
to research into real-time Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-enabled surveillance services, remote
sensing applications, spatial epidemiology, spatio-temporal statistics, and even cyberspace mapping.
Social Science & Medicine
http://www.journals.elsevier.com/social-science-and-medicine/
The journal publishes material relevant to any aspect of health from a wide range of social science disciplines (anthropology, economics, epidemiology, geography, policy, psychology, and sociology), and material relevant to the social sciences from any of the professions concerned with physical and mental
health, health care, clinical practice, and health policy and organization.
TED Talks
Are you on twitter?
Below if the twitter handle for some Health Geography
Study Group members and other groups/individuals you
may wish to follow:

Jianhong (Cecilia) Xia, Senior Lecturer, Department of
Spatial Sciences, Curtain University: @cxia8

Suzanne Mavoa, Senior GIS Analyst, GIS Team Leader,
McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit, University of Melbourne: @suze

Ori Gudes, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow through CRCSI
and the Department of Spatial Sciences, Curtin University: @OriGudes

The New York Academy of Medicine advances solutions
that promote the health and well-being of people in
cities worldwide: @NYAMNYC

AURIN, The Australian Urban Research Infrastructure
Network (AURIN) provides access to data and tools for
urban researchers across Australia: @aurin_org_au
For inclusion in the next newsletter and to profile yourself
to other HGSG members send your twitter handle to:
[email protected] (@lukar_t)
Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in
South Central LA — in abandoned lots,
traffic medians, along the curbs. Why?
For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to
offer some alternative to fast food in a
community where "the drive-thrus are
killing more people than the drivebys."
https://www.ted.com/talks/
ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_sou
th_central_la
Where you live: It impacts your health
as much as diet and genes do, but it's
not part of your medical records. At
TEDMED, Bill Davenhall shows how
overlooked government geo-data
(from local heart-attack rates to toxic
dumpsite info) can mesh with mobile
GPS apps to keep doctors in the loop.
Call it "geo-medicine."
https://www.ted.com/talks/
bill_davenhall_your_health_depends_
on_where_you_live
Upcoming conferences
2016 American Association of Geographers' Annual Meeting (San Francisco: March 29 - April 2, 2016):
http://www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting
The 13th International Conference on Urban Health (San Francisco: April 1, 2016 - April 4, 2016):
http://icuh2016.org/
Joint programme arranged by the International Society on Urban Health and The American Association of
Geographers:
April 1-2: "Geography & Urban Health"
April 3-4: "Place & Health"
* if you are attending these events and would like to link in with other Australian HGSG members at this
conference please email Lukar ([email protected]) and he will coordinate this.
H-City, an international conference about the geographies of health and living in cities (Hong Kong,
June 21-24th, 2016): http://geog.hku.hk/H-city/index.html
33rd International Geographical Congress - Shaping Our Harmonious Worlds (Beijing, China: August 21
-25, 2016): http://www.igc2016.org/dct/page/1
Pre-Conference to the IGC on Health Geography: Shaping Geographies of Health, Health Care and Environment ( Xi'an, China: 18-21 August 2016): http://www.iguhep.org/uploads/1/9/2/1/19218869/
first_announcement_and_call_for_papers.pdf
17th International Medical Geography Symposium (Angers, France: 2-7 July 2017): http://
www.irdes.fr/imgs2017/index.htm
Health Geographers meet at the New Zealand Geography Society Conference:
Geographical Interconnections, February 2016
The bi-annual New Zealand Geography Society Conference was held 1-4 February in Dunedin New Zealand.
Many health geographers participated actively in the conference and organised two special sessions and a
panel discussion. The first special session ‘Geographies of Ageing’ was run by Janine Wiles and Friederike
Ziegler and the second special session ‘Health inequalities and beyond’ was organised by Alison Watkins, Sarah Lovell and Christina Ergler. The thirteen presenters (postgraduate students, early career researchers and
well-known health researchers) covered various health and wellbeing issues in our complex and changing
world. Topics ranged from the impact of technologies on ageing in place (Mansvelt), excess winter morbidity
among the elderly in New Zealand (Brundson), disruptions in therapeutic landscapes for stroke survivors
(Milligan), the need for a new index of rurality to explore inequalities in health outcomes (Zhao) to rethinking
current nicotine policies and practices (Thompson), questioning the meaning of poverty and exclusion in light
of changing welfare reforms (Stolte) and loneliness and its mental health implications (Morrison). In line with
the conference theme, these two sessions connected health geographers with researchers located in public
health, nursing and psychology, but they also fostered conversations between health researchers whose approaches or theoretical frames for exploring health and wellbeing are at different ends of the methodological
or theoretical spectrum. The diversity of the health geography community in New Zealand was further taken
up in the panel discussion ‘Looking back and moving forward: Health geography in Aotearoa and beyond’.
The four panellists (Lee Thompson, Christine Milligan, Daniel Exeter and Robin Kearns) drew on their own experiences to reflect on key developments in health geography in Aotearoa New Zealand and outlined their
visions of future challenges for health geography (e.g. integrating health and wellbeing issues more explicitly
into mainstream geography, contestation and activism, health geographers’ identity issues, measuring and
advancing methodological and theoretical debates on place and space).
Geospatial services with the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services
The Department of Health and Human Services (Victoria) has a department wide geospatial environment
which provides staff with access to centralised GIS ready datasets, services (geocoding being one such
service), online mapping functionality and access to ArcGIS desktop licences. The environment resides
within the Department's IT infrastructure and allows users to logon from any computer on the Department's intranet.
Our approach to geospatial in the department is to acquire, store and manage once and use many times.
The environmental health and communicable diseases areas of the Department are big users of our spatial services. In these areas business databases integrate with the GIS environment through scheduled
uploads and processes, and also through live database links. This allows the online mapping functionality
to draw on live business data in the calculation of population rates (for example the number of confirmed
Influenza cases / population per a specified geographic areas like postcode or Local Government Area).
We also provide spatial functionality which allows the business area to perform basic searches (like address, as stored and managed on the GIS databases) and perform a buffer analysis to identify any associated data within a specified distance. This functionality is simple, fast and effective for business needs. By
integrating the business with the GIS environment, we are able to provide business critical geographic
information and functionality.
We perform numerous adhoc spatial analysis and mapping requests for various areas of the Department.
A common request relates to accessibility, and is often framed around service locations and population
and demographics. Finding population cohorts in a specified drive time from service locations is one example.
The GIS team is involved in compiling the Local Government Area profiles, Town and Community profiles
and Regional Health Status profiles (https://www2.health.vic.gov.au/about/reporting-planning-data/gisand-planning-products).
We have just completed our three year strategic plan which sets the scene for geospatial capabilities for
the Department for 2016 to 2020. As part of this strategy, we are aiming to launch an open spatial data
site to allow for smarter access to spatial data from the Department to the public.
For further information, please contact:
Clare Brazenor
GIS Team Leader | Modelling, GIS and Planning Products, System Intelligence & Analytics Branch
Department of Health and Human Services
18 / 50 Lonsdale St, Melbourne, Victoria 3000 t. (03) 9096 7928 | e. [email protected]
Recent publications (from HGSG members and other publications of interest)
Books & reports
 Health Of People, Places And Planet: Reflections Based On Tony McMichael’s Four Decades Of Contribution To
Epidemiological Understanding.
Full book can be downloaded from: http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/health-of-people-places-and-planet/pdfdownload/
 World Health Organisation (2010) Hidden cities: Unmasking and overcoming health inequities in urban settings.
WHO: Switzerland. http://www.who.int/kobe_centre/publications/hidden_cities2010/en/
 Markham, F. (2015). The Open Accessibility and Remoteness Index for Australia: Technical Report. Figshare.
http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1574190
Note from Francis:
I've reimplemented the ARIA+ algorithm and made the results available as open data for 2001, 2006 and 2011. Instead of the five ARIA+ derived remoteness categories the ABS provide, Open ARIA makes it easy to use a continuous measure of remoteness based on the ARIA+. Aside from being freely available, Open ARIA does have one major
difference from ARIA+: it is not based on the road network (solely for simplicity of computation. As such, the results
are likely to diverge from ARIA+ in areas of low network connectivity (i.e. very remote places probably are measured
as being somewhat less remote than ARIA+ would imply). I'm open to feedback, criticism, etc. on the Open ARIA
data.
Please contact Francis to discuss further: [email protected]
Special issues
 Spatial Aspects of Health: Methods and Applications
AIMS Public Health, July 2015: http://www.aimspress.com/newsinfo/189.html

Drugs, law, people, place and the state: ongoing regulation, resistance and change’
Space and Polity, Issue 1, 2016: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cspp20/current
This special issue was guest edited by Dr Stewart Williams (University of Tasmania) and Professor Barney Warf
(University of Kentucky). Public health features in most of the eight articles contributed there, especially as it relates to state legislation controlling the use of drugs such as alcohol, cannabis and heroin. Four of those articles
focus on harm reduction policies, programs and promotion, which are examined from a spatial perspective.

Themed section: Geographies of Wellbeing. Guest edited by Tim Schwanen and Sarah Atkinson
The Geographical Journal, June 2015: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/geoj.2015.181.issue-2/issuetoc
Manuscripts
 Atkinson, S., Woods, A., Evans, B, & Kearns, R. (2015) ‘The medical’ and ‘health’ in a critical medical humanities. Jour-
nal of Medical Humanities. 36 (1) 71-81. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25502919
 Badland H, Mavoa S, Livingston M, David S, Giles-Corti B. (In press). Testing spatial measures of alcohol outlet density
with self-rated health in the Australian context: Implications for policy and practice. Drug and Alcohol Review. http://
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26424454
 Barr, A., Bentley, R., Simpson, J.A., Scheurer, J., Owen, N., Dunstan, D., Thornton, L.E., Krnjacki, L., Kavanagh, A.M., (In
press) Associations of public transport accessibility with walking, obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Journal of
Transport and Health. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140516000086
 Boyle, A., Wiles, J.L., & Kearns, R.A. (2015). Rethinking ageing in place: the ‘people’ and ‘place’ nexus. Progress in Ge-
ography. 34 (12): 1495-1511. http://www.progressingeography.com/EN/abstract/abstract37160.shtml
 Carroll, P., Witten, K., Kearns, R. And Donovan, P. (2015) Kids in the City: children’s use and experiences of urban
neighbourhoods in Auckland, New Zealand. Journal of Urban Design. 20 (4) 417-436. http://www.tandfonline.com/
doi/full/10.1080/13574809.2015.1044504
 Christian, H., Zubrick, S.R., Sarah, F., Giles-Corti, B., Bull, F., Wood, L., Knuiman, M., Brinkman, S., Houghton, S., and
Boruff, B. (2015). The influence of the neighborhood physical environment on early child health and development: A
review and call for research. Health & Place. 33:25-36. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25744220
 Coleman, T.M. & Kearns, R.A. (2015) The role of blue spaces in experiencing place, aging and wellbeing: insights from
Waiheke Island, New Zealand. Health & Place. 35:206-217. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S1353829214001464
 Corburn, J. (2015). City planning as preventive medicine. Preventive Medicine, 77. 48-51. http://
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25937591
 Daker M, Pieters J, and Coffee N T (In press), “Validating and measuring public open space is not a walk in the park”
Australian Planner http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07293682.2016.1139605
 Freeman, C. & Kearns R.A. (2015) Childhoods under canvas: Campgrounds as spaces of resistance to protective par-
enting. Childhood. 22(1), 101–120. http://chd.sagepub.com/content/22/1/101.abstract
 Glanz, K., Handy, S. L., Henderson, K. E., Slater, S. J., Davis, E. L. & Powell, L. M. (2016) Built environment assessment:
Multidisciplinary perspectives. SSM - Population Health, 2, 24-31. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S2352827316000069
 Jokela, M. (2015) Does neighbourhood deprivation cause poor health? Analysis of movers in a prospective cohort
study. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. 69:899-904. http://jech.bmj.com/content/69/9/899.short?rss=1
 King, T.L., Bentley, R.J., Thornton, L.E., Kavanagh, A.M. (2016) Using kernel density estimation to understand the influ-
ence of neighbourhood destinations on BMI. BMJ Open. 6: e008878. http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/2/
e008878.full
 Lamb, K.E., Thornton, L.E., Cerin, E., Ball, K. (2015) Statistical approaches used to assess the equity of access to food
outlets: a systematic review. AIMS Public Health. 2(3): 358-401. http://www.aimspress.com/article/10.3934/
publichealth.2015.3.358
 Markham, F., & Young, M. (2016). Commentary on Dowling et al. (2016): Is it time to stop conducting problem gam-
bling prevalence studies? Addiction, 111(3), 436–437. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.13216/abstract
 Markham, F., Young, M., & Doran, B. (2016). The relationship between player losses and gambling-related harm: evi-
dence from nationally representative cross-sectional surveys in four countries. Addiction, 111(2), 320–330. http://
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26567515
 Moran, M.R., Plaut, P., Epel, O.B., (In press) Do children walk where they bike? Exploring built environment correlates
of children's walking and bicycling. Journal of Transport and Land Use. https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/
view/556
 Neuwelt, P., Kearns, R.A. & Browne, A. (2015) The place of receptionists in access to primary care: Challenges in the
space between community and consultation. Social Science & Medicine. 133, 287–295. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pubmed/25455478
 Oliver, M., Mavoa, S., Badland, H., Parker, K., Donovan, P., Kearns, R., Lin, E-Y, & Witten, K. (2015) Associations be-
tween the neighbourhood built environment and out-of-school physical activity and active travel: An examination from
the Kids in the City study. Health and Place. 36, 57–64. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/
S1353829215001240
 Oliver, M., Witten, K, Blakely, T., Parker, K., Badland, H., Schofield, G. Ivory, V, Pearce,J., Mavoa, S, Hinckson, E.,
Sweetsur, P. & Kearns, R.A. (2015) Neighbourhood built environment associations with body size in adults: Mediating
effects of activity and sedentariness in a cross-sectional study of New Zealand adults. BMC Public Health. 15:956.
http://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-015-2292-2
 Owen, G., Harris, R., Jones, K. (In press). Under examination: Multilevel models, geography and health research. Pro-
gress in Human Geography. http://phg.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/21/0309132515580814.abstract
 Sun, Q., J. Xia, et al. (In press). Assessing Drivers’ Visual-motor Coordination Using Eye Tracking, GNSS and GIS: a Spa-
tial Turn in Driving Psychology. Journal of Spatial Science.
 Thornton, L.E., Lamb, K.E., Ball, K. (2016) Fast food restaurant locations according to socioeconomic disadvantage, ur-
ban-regional locality, and schools within Victoria, Australia. Social Science & Medicine – Population Health. 2: 1-9.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827315000142
 Trapp, G.S.A., Hickling, S., Christian, H.E., Bull, F., Timperio, A.F., Boruff, B., Shrestha, D., and Giles-Corti, B. (2015) Indi-
vidual, Social, and Environmental Correlates of Healthy and Unhealthy Eating. Health Education & Behavior. 42(6):75968. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25842383
 Witten, K., Kearns, R. & Carroll, P. (2015) Urban inclusion as wellbeing: exploring children's accounts of confronting
diversity on inner city streets. Social Science & Medicine. 133, 349–357. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pubmed/25618307
Other resources and announcements
Latest news from the geospatial, surveying, GIS and mapping industries across Australia and New Zealand: http://www.spatialsource.com.au/
Open data
The G-NAF and Administrative Boundaries datasets are available for use and reuse at no charge to end
users through the Australian Government’s online data portal, data.gov.au. Updated versions of these
datasets will be published on a quarterly basis.
The G-NAF is available at: www.data.gov.au/dataset/geocoded-national-address-file-g-naf
The Administrative Boundaries dataset is available at: www.data.gov.au/dataset/psma-administrativeboundaries
VicRoads: This site provides an easy way to find and access a wealth of road and transport related data.
http://vicroadsopendata.vicroadsmaps.opendata.arcgis.com/
ArcGIS Open Data Showcase: http://dcdev.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapAndAppGallery/index.html?
appid=986aa5afeda44bfca53f66b5d1f42d62
As part of your ArcGIS Online subscription, you can use ArcGIS Open Data to share your live authoritative
open data. Esri-hosted ArcGIS Open Data gives you a quick way to set up public-facing websites where
people can easily find and download your open data in a variety of open formats. http://
opendata.arcgis.com/
ArcGIS Open Data Site of the Week: https://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/tag/site-of-the-week/
Future newsletters
Please forward relevant content to Lukar Thornton: [email protected]; Twitter @lukar_t
IAG Health Geography Study Group contacts
Chair/convenor: Dr Neil Coffee, University of South Australia ([email protected])
Secretary: Dr Ori Gudes, Curtin University ([email protected])
Treasurer and newsletter co-ordinator: Dr Lukar Thornton, Deakin University ([email protected])
REMINDER—SAVE THE DATE AND IAG ABSTRACTS

“Save the date” Health Geography Pre Conference Workshop Date 28 June.

IAG abstract submissions close on 25th March 2016. When submitting a relevant abstract please select the health geography theme. Abstract submission details are found on this website: https://
kaigi.eventsair.com/QuickEventWebsitePortal/iag-2016/info/ExtraContent/ContentPage2