This code is based on an approach developed by the Office for National Statistics' Data Science Campus, which uses GP prescription data to find areas with above-average prescriptions for five conditions where loneliness has been shown to be a risk factor: Alzheimer's, depression, high blood pressure, anxiety and insomnia.
The Maps sub-folder contains two PDFs:
Loneliness - whole UK.pdf: showing the loneliness index for the whole UKLoneliness - whole UK - above-average risks only.pdf: showing the loneliness index only for areas that are at above-average risk of loneliness
Shapefiles and a .csv file containing the loneliness prescription index for Middle Layer Super Output Areas (England/Wales), Intermediate Zones (Scotland) and Super Output Areas (Northern Ireland) are in each country's sub-folder within this repository.
Before running the code, you'll need to download prescription and GP surgery data for each of the UK nations. Instructions for this is in each country's Loneliness Process Data...ipynb file. Once you've copied the data into the relevant sub-folders of each country's folder (again, see comments in the code for details), run the Loneliness Process Data...ipynb file to generate the loneliness prescription index. Afterwards, run MSOA Mapping...ipynb to produce the shapefiles (you'll also need to download the MSOA [or equivalent] shapefiles first).