Clery Amanda, Bunting Catherine, Liu Mengyun, Harron Katie, Woodman Jenny, Mc Grath-Lone Louise
UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London, London, WC1N 1EH.
Thomas Coram Research Unit, Social Research Institute, University College London, London, WC1H 0AA.
Int J Popul Data Sci. 2024 Jun 20;9(1):2385. doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v9i1.2385. eCollection 2024.
Health visiting is a community service provided to families with children under five in England and is a key focus of early years policy. Individual-level data on health visiting is captured in the Community Services Data Set (CSDS), an administrative dataset of publicly funded community services across England. Analyses of CSDS are considered experimental as the dataset matures.
In this study, we aimed to identify health visiting contacts in the CSDS and assess the completeness of these data from 2016/17 to 2019/20 compared to external reference data.
We identified the number of the four mandated postnatal health visiting contacts delivered, excluding those scheduled but not attended, between April 2016 and March 2020. We compared counts by local authority (LA) and financial quarter against the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities' Health Visitor Service Delivery Metrics (HVSDM) to identify a subnational subset of complete CSDS data. We explored the representativeness of this subset.
During the study period, 10.2 million health visiting contacts were delivered to 2.4 million children in England. Of these, we identified 3.9 million mandated contacts based on CSDS codes and age at time of contact, which represented 44.7% of all mandated contacts reported in the HVSDM for the same period. There were 63 LAs with complete CSDS data in at least one quarter, which were broadly representative of English LAs overall. Variables related to staff characteristics were highly missing and only 13 LAs had four or more successive quarters of complete data needed for longitudinal, child-level analyses.
We identified a subnational subset of complete CSDS data, compared to external reference data, which can be used for health visiting research. Until improvements are made to its completeness, analyses (particularly those requiring longitudinal data) may not be generalisable to the whole child population.
健康访视是一项为英格兰五岁以下儿童家庭提供的社区服务，也是早期政策的重点关注领域。健康访视的个体层面数据记录在社区服务数据集（CSDS）中，该数据集是英格兰公共资助社区服务的行政数据集。随着数据集的成熟，对CSDS的分析被视为实验性分析。
在本研究中，我们旨在识别CSDS中的健康访视接触情况，并将2016/17年至2019/20年这些数据的完整性与外部参考数据进行比较。
我们确定了2016年4月至2020年3月期间提供的四次法定产后健康访视接触的次数，不包括那些已安排但未进行的访视。我们将地方当局（LA）和财政季度的计数与健康改善与差异办公室的健康访视服务提供指标（HVSDM）进行比较，以确定CSDS完整数据的次国家级子集。我们探讨了该子集的代表性。
在研究期间，英格兰有1020万次健康访视接触提供给了240万儿童。其中，我们根据CSDS代码和接触时的年龄确定了390万次法定接触，占同期HVSDM报告的所有法定接触的44.7%。至少有一个季度有完整CSDS数据的地方当局有63个，总体上大致代表了英格兰的地方当局。与工作人员特征相关的变量大量缺失，只有13个地方当局有四个或更多连续季度的完整数据，这些数据是纵向儿童层面分析所必需的。
与外部参考数据相比，我们确定了CSDS完整数据的次国家级子集，可用于健康访视研究。在其完整性得到改善之前，分析（特别是那些需要纵向数据的分析）可能无法推广到整个儿童群体。
