  The rates of respiratory prescriptions vary by GP surgery across Scotland,
suggesting there are sizeable health inequalities in respiratory ill health
across the country. The aim of this paper is to estimate the magnitude, spatial
pattern and drivers of this spatial variation. Monthly data on respiratory
prescriptions are available at the GP surgery level, which creates an
interesting methodological challenge as these data are not the classical
geostatistical, areal unit or point process data types. A novel
process-convolution model is proposed, which extends existing methods by being
an adaptive smoother via a random weighting scheme and using a tapering
function to reduce the computational burden. The results show that particulate
air pollution, poverty and ethnicity all drive the health inequalities, while
there are additional regional inequalities in rates after covariate adjustment.
