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

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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.