Guthrie, E. orcid.org/0000-0002-5834-6616, House, A. orcid.org/0000-0001-8721-8026, Smith, C. et al. (11 more authors) (2024) Linkage of routinely collected NHS data to evaluate liaison mental health services: challenges and lessons learned. Health and Social Care Delivery Research. ISSN 2755-0060
Abstract
Background Liaison mental health services provide mental health care to patients in acute hospital settings. Evaluation of liaison services is challenging due to their heterogeneous organisation and delivery, high case throughput and varied patient case mix. We aimed to link routinely collected National Health Service data from secondary care settings, chosen for their service characteristics, to data from primary care to evaluate hospital-based liaison mental health services in England.
Methods We planned to compare patients referred to hospital-based liaison services with comparable patients in the same hospital not referred to liaison services and comparable patients in hospitals without any liaison services. We designed and enacted a methodology to link data from: (1) Hospital Episode Statistics, a database controlled by the National Health Service Digital and (2) ResearchOne, a primary care database controlled by The Phoenix Partnership.
Results Obtaining approvals for the steps prespecified in the methodological protocol took 907 days. Enactment following approvals took 385 days. Data supplied from Hospital Episode Statistics contained 181,063 patients from 6 hospitals (mean = 30,177, standard deviation = 28,875.86) who matched the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Data supplied from ResearchOne contained 33,666 (18.6%) of these patients from the 6 hospitals (mean = 5611, standard deviation = 5206.59).
Discussion Time required for approvals and enactment was attributable to slowness of data handling processes within each data holder and to resolution of technical and organisational queries between them. Variation in number of patients for which data was supplied between databases and between hospitals was attributable to coding inconsistencies and to the limited intersection of patient populations between databases and variation in recording practices between hospitals.
Conclusion Although it is technically feasible to link primary and secondary care data, the current system is challenging, complicated, unnecessarily bureaucratic, time consuming and costly. This limits the number of studies that could be conducted with these rich data sources.
Funding This article presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme as award number 13/58/08.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 Guthrie et al. This work was produced by Guthrie et al. under the terms of a commissioning contract issued by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. This is an Open Access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0 licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. For attribution the title, original author(s), the publication source – NIHR Journals Library, and the DOI of the publication must be cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Medicine (Leeds) > Leeds Institute of Health Sciences (Leeds) > Centre for Health Services Research (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Medicine (Leeds) > Leeds Institute of Health Sciences (Leeds) > Academic Unit of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Dentistry (Leeds) > Applied Health and Clinical Translation (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Medicine (Leeds) > Leeds Institute of Health Sciences (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 20 Aug 2024 11:00 |
Last Modified: | 20 Aug 2024 11:00 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | NIHR Journals Library |
Identification Number: | 10.3310/wcpa5283 |
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Sustainable Development Goals: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:216268 |