Maximising the Use of Existing Administrative Data Sets for Wales through Data Linking

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A large amount of information collected about people in Wales through routine interaction with various services at considerable cost. Currently a lot of this is in disparate data sets. If this information can be brought together in a linked manner there is a tremendous capacity to creat 'value added' knowledge about the effects of intervention and policy change, and about what effects the health and well being of the population. Research can be carried out examining the relationships and patterns occurring in the data that may provide new insights into how to address population level problems. The problem with bringing together the disperate routine datasets is the potential to breach confidentiality;to step outside the agreed boundaries of why the data was originally collected and how it should be used. The disclosure of personal information to someone that was not intended to have access to it must remain completely impossible. It has been demonstrated through the Secure Anonymised Individual Linked, (SAIL) project at Swansea University, that it is possible to separate personal characteristics, event data and service interactions relating to individuals, from those individual's identitfiable information, in a satisfactory way for researchers to bring together and compare data from different data sources. This is achieved by the identifiable part of each record being removed and replaced with a code number called a matching key. Matching keys are generated by a trusted third party organisation in such a way that information originating from an individual in one dataset can be matched to that in another dataset without the identity of the individual being present.The work of SAIL has been heavily based upon health datasets, and an enormous quantity of linkable health related data is now available in a secure research environment. This project is about further expanding the data collection in partnership, developing a clear understanding of the issues, the practical steps required, and the potential to better inform decision makers. This will be done through the structured development development of a number of analyses. The researcher has many years of experiences of working with data providers, mainly NHS providers, but also with local authorities in Wales and England, and considerable experience of linking data, and is now placed within the research analysis team, working directly within the SAIL environment. Within the scope of this fellowship the existing datasets within SAIL will be utilised to demonstrate the power of linked data from multiple sources to provide more effective benchmarking, enhanced understanding of the data, and more detailed answers than have previously been available for research and policy related questions.