City Research Online

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Maternity Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data for 2005-2014 were linked to birth registration and birth notification data (previously known as NHS Numbers for Babies or NN4B) to bring together some key demographic and clinical data items not otherwise available at a national level. The linkage algorithm that was previously used to link 2005-2007 data was revised to improve the linkage rate and reduce the number of duplicate HES records. METHODS: Birth registration and notification linked records from the Office for National Statistics ('ONS birth records') were further linked to Maternity HES delivery and birth records using the NHS Number and other direct identifiers if the NHS Number was missing. RESULTS: For the period 2005-2014, over 94% of birth registration and notification records were correctly linked to HES delivery records. Two per cent of the ONS birth records were incorrectly linked to the HES delivery record and 5% of ONS birth records were linked to more than one HES delivery record. Therefore, a considerable amount of time was spent in quality assuring these files. CONCLUSION: The linkage rate for birth registration and notification records to HES delivery records steadily improved from 2005 to 2014 due to improvement in the quality and completeness of patient identifiers in both HES and birth notification data.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2018. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher Keywords:	births; linkage; national data
Subjects:	R Medicine > RT Nursing
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Midwifery & Radiography
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads