Creating harmonised and scalable methods and tools for constructing households in large diverse administrative and health research datasets

COVID - 19大流行表明，过度拥挤等家庭环境对身心健康和教育有多么重要。它还强调了利用公共服务部门例行收集的信息进行研究的好处。目前，很难利用这种常规信息来研究家庭情况，如过度拥挤，因为我们不能轻易地识别家庭，并将住房信息与健康和教育信息联系起来。我们需要更好的工具和常规数据集来开展家庭研究，特别是对健康、社会和住房问题最紧迫的家庭进行研究。一种方法是使用“唯一属性参考编号”（upn）。英国的每一处房产都有一个upn——一个由12个数字组成的字符串——与邮政编码不同，无论是养老院、公寓、房子、商店还是学校，它都是独一无二的。我们可以在患者向全科医生注册时提供的地址中添加upn。然后，upn可以被编码或“加密”，以保护隐私，并允许安全地进行研究。upn是帮助我们将同一家庭成员的信息联系起来的关键。它们还可以用来将家庭及其成员的健康数据与住房信息联系起来——例如，为理事会税收评估定期记录的房间数量或面积——以便我们能够确定过度拥挤的家庭。我们是一群来自苏格兰、威尔士和伦敦的研究人员，他们共同研究了upn。我们现在计划创建一个新的数据集和工具——目前还没有——来识别家庭及其社会、经济、环境、教育和健康状况，供研究人员使用。我们的项目旨在帮助研究人员安全使用upn，并回答一些关于家庭的重要问题。我们将通过研究生活在健康、社会和住房问题较多的家庭中如何影响儿童的身心健康、他们的出勤率和成绩以及他们对社会照顾的需求，举出一些例子来说明这是多么有用。我们还将利用它来了解我们社区中最脆弱的家庭在哪里，以及这可能如何影响他们获得和使用所需的公共服务。我们将与当地社区合作，更清楚地解释upn及其好处，了解他们希望我们如何为公共利益使用upn，并听取和解决他们可能对其安全使用的任何担忧，包括与隐私有关的担忧。

The COVID pandemic has shown how important household circumstances such as over-crowding are for physical and mental health and education. It has also highlighted the benefits of using information collected routinely by public services for research. At present it is difficult to use this routine information for research into household circumstances such as over-crowding because we can't easily identify households and join information on housing to information on health and education. We need better tools and routine datasets to carry out research on households, especially on households with the most pressing health, social and housing problems. One way to do this is by using 'Unique Property Reference Numbers' - UPRNs. Every property in the UK has a UPRN - a string of 12 numbers - which, unlike postcodes, are unique to an individual property whether it is a care home, flat, house, shop, or school. We can add UPRNs to the addresses patients provide when they register with a general practitioner. The UPRNs can then be coded or 'encrypted' to protect privacy and allow research to be safely carried out. UPRNs are a key that help us to link information about people who share the same household. They can also be used to link households and the health data of their members to housing information - for example number of rooms or floor space recorded routinely for council tax assessments - so that we can identify overcrowded households. We are a group of researchers from Scotland, Wales and London who have worked on UPRNs together. We now plan to create a new dataset and tools - currently unavailable - to identify households and their social, economic, environmental, educational, and health circumstances for researchers to use. Our project sets out to help researchers use UPRNs safely and answer some important questions about households.We will develop some examples to show how useful this by looking at how living in households with more health, social and housing problems affects children's physical and mental health, their school attendance and achievements, and their need for social care. We will also use it to understand where the most vulnerable households are in our communities and how this might affect their access to and use of the public services they need.We will work with our local communities to explain UPRNs and their benefits more clearly and understand how they want us to use UPRNs for public benefit and to hear about and address any concerns they may have about their safe use, including those relevant to privacy.