Data Sources: Administrative Data

Question 1

Define ‘administrative data’.

Answer 1

Data is primarily collected for administrative purposes and not for health research/monitoring purposes.

Question 2

Who mainly collects administrative data?

Answer 2

Largely collected by Institutions e.g. hospitals and/or UK Government e.g. welfare, educational, tax records

Question 3

What are the Hospital Episode Statistics in England (HES)?

Answer 3

Record based system that covers all NHS Trusts
in England.

Question 4

List strengths of HES.

Answer 4

• Large medical database = covers population of approx 50,000,000 +, covers all NHS hospitals ~ 90-95% of all in-patient care
• Un-interrupted data collection since 1989
• Resident and registered populations
• Geographically and temporally referenced
• Diagnoses & procedures coded using standardised coding
  frames

Question 5

What are the limitations of HES?

Answer 5

Specific data-quality issues, e.g. boundary and organisational changes over time, poor data in maternity, critical care, and earlier years.
- Excludes most activity in private hospitals
- Coding issues, e.g. ethnicity
- Not all illnesses results in hospital activity – only patients
who have been admitted are recorded.
- It does not provide prevalence of diseases nor incidence
- HES is not a live system = time lag – annual extract is 9 months behind