Construction of a linked health and social care database resource – lessons on process, content and culture

Abstract

Background: Combining routinely collected health and social care data on older people is essential to advance both service delivery and research for this client group. Little data is available on how to combine health and social care data; this article provides an overview of a successful data linkage process and discusses potential barriers to executing such projects.

Methods and results: We successfully obtained and linked data on older people within Dundee from three sources: Dundee Social Work Department database (30 000 individuals aged 65 years and over), healthcare data held on NHS Tayside patients by the Health Informatics Centre (400 000 individuals), Dundee, and the Dundee of Medicine for the Elderly rehabilitation database (4300 individuals). Data were linked, anonymized and transferred to a Safe Haven environment to ensuring confidentiality and strict access control. Challenges were faced around workflows, culture and documentation. Exploiting the resultant data set raises further challenges centered on database documentation, understanding the way data were collected, dealing with missing data, data validity and collection at different time periods.

Conclusion: Routinely collected health and social care data sets can be linked, but significant process barriers must be overcome to allow successful linkage and integration of data and its full exploitation.

• Database
• medical record linkage
• older
• social work

Acknowledgements

Diane McCulloch, Jenni Tocher and Lynsey Webster from Dundee Social Work; Dr Lynn Ramage and secretarial staff from Dundee Medicine for the Elderly department; staff at the Health Informatics Centre, University of Dundee.

Declaration of interest

None. Grant funding for this project was provided by the Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy, funded via the UK Medical Research Council and the Scottish Government Chief Scientist Office (grant number SCPH/10). The grant funding provided funds for data analysts, data charges for accessing healthcare data from the Health Informatics Centre (HIC), University of Dundee, and money to support data extraction from DSWD, data cleaning and analysis.