Harnessing cross-country administrative data to evaluate national policy impacts on maternal, infant and child health and health inequalities-MatCHNet

许多慢性病都起源于婴儿期和儿童期，并形成了社会模式。健康的社会决定因素是复杂和相互关联的，可能受到人口特征、政策和服务提供的影响。英国国家和权力下放政府在母职和早年推出了许多政策，但这些政策中的大多数都没有得到评估。它们已经在全国推广，很难评估适用于全体人口的政策。此外，寻找适当的数据、比较组和方法来评估这些政策也是有问题的。这四个英国国家都有自己的行政数据收集系统，收集不同的信息。然而，在跨政府部门联系、人口一级的行政数据(涉及家庭成员、政策领域和生命周期)方面出现了创新，这为评估可能解决慢性病和减少健康不平等的政策提供了机会。母婴健康网(Match-Net)将发展一个由公共卫生研究人员、方法学家、政策制定者和服务提供者组成的多学科社区，他们可以共同确定国家政策干预的优先事项，或可对不利儿童结果的社会、环境或服务决定因素进行可行和有效的评估。这个多学科网络从一开始就嵌入了研究用户，旨在确定此类政策的优先顺序，确定可比的行政数据来源和措施，并巩固和传播对国家政策进行强有力评估的方法。通过与用户合作，Match-Net将为评估上游的国家政策奠定基础，这些政策受到用户的优先考虑，如政策制定者、从业人员、多部门公共组织和第三部门组织。因此，所有网络活动都将与这四个关键群体相关，并可供他们使用，以确保这些潜在受益者最大限度地参与。决策者将在确定评估政策的优先顺序方面发挥重要作用。此外，他们还将根据自己特定的职权范围、部门和政策背景，从非传染性疾病的政策执行中吸取经验教训，从而考虑能够对预防非传染性疾病以及更广泛的社会和经济效益产生深远影响的其他政策办法。来自英国四个国家和不同政策部门的行政数据持有者将参加所有活动，但将在围绕常规数据的活动中发挥关键作用。研究人员将了解可用的数据，数据持有者可以相互了解最佳的数据收集、存储和共享。他们将了解将他们的数据集与其他部门数据联系起来的可能性，并深入了解如何使用和增强他们的数据来评估改善妇幼保健的政策。匹配网络对政策制定者、从业人员和家庭的长期好处将是该网络开展的基础工作所产生的未来研究。这将为影响幼儿结果决定因素的社会政策提供更完善和丰富的证据基础。根据定义，这些全人口社会政策干预措施有可能影响英国各地家庭的生活。通过准备赠款资金申请来评估与利益攸关方和用户一起举办的研讨会和活动优先考虑的政策，将确保匹配网络的可持续性。在这些提议中，我们将要求提供少量资金，使网络活动能够在较长期内继续下去。

Many chronic diseases have their origins in infancy and childhood and are socially patterned. The social determinants of health are complex and inter-related and may be influenced by population characteristics, policies, and service provision. UK national and devolved governments have introduced many policies in maternal and early years, but most of these policies have not been evaluated. They have been rolled out across the whole country and it is difficult to evaluate policies that apply to the whole population. In addition finding appropriate data, comparison groups and methods to evaluate these policies is problematic. Each of the four UK countries has its own administrative data collection systems which collect different information. However, there have been innovations in cross-government sector linked, population-level administrative data (which span family members, policy areas and the lifecourse) which provide opportunities to evaluate policies which may address chronic disease and reduce health inequalities. The Maternal and Child Health Network (MatCH-Net) will develop a multidisciplinary, community of public health researchers, methodologists, policy makers and service providers who together can prioritise national policy interventions, or social, environmental or service determinants of adverse child outcomes that can be feasibly and validly evaluated. The multidisciplinary network, with research users embedded from the start, aims to prioritise such policies, identify comparable administrative data sources and measures, and consolidate and disseminate methods for robust evaluation of national policies. By working together with users, MatCH-Net will lay the groundwork for the evaluation of upstream, national polices, which are prioritised by users, such as policy makers, practitioners, multi-sectoral public organisations and third sector organisations. All network activities will therefore be relevant and accessible to these four key groups to ensure maximum engagement of these potential beneficiaries.The policy-makers will be play an important role in the prioritisation of policies for evaluation. In addition they will learn from policy implementation outwith their own particular remit, department and policy context and thus consider other policy approaches which can have far reaching impacts on NCD prevention and wider societal and economic benefits. Administrative Data Holders from the four UK countries and different policy sectors will attend all events, but will play a key role in those around routine data. Researchers will learn about the data that are available and data holders can learn from each other about optimal data collection, storage, and sharing. They will have an understanding of the potential for linking their data sets with other departmental data and gain an insight into how their data can be used and enhanced to evaluate policies to improve maternal and child health.Longer-term benefits of MatCH-Net to policy makers, practitioners and families will be the future research that will flow from the foundational work undertaken by the network. This will lead to an improved and rich evidence base for social policy affecting the determinants of early childhood outcomes. By definition these whole population social policy interventions have the potential to impact on the lives of families across the UK.The sustainability of MatCH-Net will be ensured by the preparation of grant funding applications to evaluate the policies prioritised by the workshops and activities with the stakeholders and users. Within these proposals we will request small amounts of funding to enable network activities to continue in the longer term.