Developing an openly accessible multi-dimensional small area index of ‘Access to Healthy Assets and Hazards’ for Great Britain, 2016

Health geographers have been long concerned with understanding how the accessibility of individuals to certain environmental features may influence health and wellbeing. Such insights are increasingly being adopted by policy makers for designing healthy neighbourhoods. To support and inform decision making, there is a need for small area national level data. This paper details the creation of a suite of open access health indicators, including a novel multidimensional index summarising 14 health-related features of neighbourhoods for Great Britain. We find no association of our overall index with physical health measures, but a significant association to mental wellbeing. •There is greater need for open data on health-related features of neighbourhoods.•Designing multi-dimensional indices can help to describe environments.•The overall index is associated with mental wellbeing, but not physical health.•The domains of AHAH are consistently associated to our health outcomes.•All data are openly available at http://maps.cdrc.ac.uk.