Abstract
BackgroundA 44 % increase was observed in admissions to neonatal intensive care of babies born ≤26 weeks completed gestational age in England between 1995 and 2006. Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) may provide supplementary information to investigate this. The methods and results of a probabilistic data linkage exercise are reported.MethodsTwo data sets were linked for each year (1995 and 2006) using 3 different algorithms (Fellegi and Sunter, Contiero and estimation-maximisation).ResultsIn 1995, linkage was performed between 668 EPICure and 486,705 HES records; 1,820 linked pairs were identified of which 422 (63.17 %) were confirmed. In 2006, from 2,750 EPICure and 631,401 HES records, 8,913 linked pairs were identified with 1,662 (60.40 %) confirmed as true. Reported births in HES at <26 weeks gestation increased 37.0 % from 867 to 1188.ConclusionsResults support the EPICure findings that there was an increase in the birth rate for extremely premature babies between 1995 and 2006. There were insufficient data available for detailed investigation. Routine data sources may not be suitable for investigations at the margins of viability.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0152-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
A 44 % increase was observed in admissions to neonatal intensive care of babies born ≤ 26 weeks completed gestational age in England between 1995 and 2006
Previous work suggests that routine data sources collected in England such as Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) or the Births and Deaths Registry provide insufficient data to permit detailed investigation [5, 6]
Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data were supplied by the NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) for each year of analysis
Summary
A 44 % increase was observed in admissions to neonatal intensive care of babies born ≤ 26 weeks completed gestational age in England between 1995 and 2006. Previous work suggests that routine data sources collected in England such as Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) or the Births and Deaths Registry provide insufficient data to permit detailed investigation [5, 6]. The EPICure 2 study collected data on all It is unclear whether the increase seen represents a true rise in the numbers of live babies being born extremely prematurely or if, instead, it reflects changes in management in the delivery room. To investigate this question, we required specific extra demographic data for 1995 to explain the rise in admission rates. We sought to supplement the EPICure data sets with additional information from Hospital Episode Statistics by performing probabilistic data linkage between each of the two data sets (EPICure and HES) available for 1995 and 2006 as Morgan et al BMC Medical Research Methodology (2016) 16:57 there were insufficient patient identifying variables to permit deterministic linkage
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