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Hello, and a big thank you for your interest in our upcoming online group discussion event.
The discussion will run for one hour on:
- Thursday 7th December from 5:30pm to 6:30pm, for young people.
- Wednesday 6th December from 6:30pm to 7:30pm, for parents and carers.
As a small token of appreciation for your time, we will be providing £15 Love2Shop vouchers.
In this session we would like to understand your views and priorities for adding new information on household to the ECHILD database, which is the database used in the HOPE study.
What is ECHILD?
ECHILD stands for “Education and Child Health Insights Linked Dataset” and it brings together information from healthcare, social care and schools records for all children and young people in England who were born from 1984 onwards (that’s about 20 million people). This includes information such as hospital admissions, special educational needs, school absence, key stage examination results and contact with children’s social care.
Records included in ECHILD have been de-identified so that researchers do not know the names, addresses or NHS numbers of children and young people included in the data. The data are securely stored and can only be accessed by carefully trained and vetted researchers, and research outputs (e.g. reports and scientific papers) are independently checked by the Office of National Statistics.
What information do we want to add to ECHILD?
We want to add an identifier called the “unique property reference number (UPRN)” for each household that is included in the ECHILD database. This information will be encrypted so that researchers can group people who live together without ever seeing the address.
How would we use this information?
We would like to use this to link together records for people living in the same household to better understand the health, education, and care needs of different households. By household we mean people who live at the same address at the same time.
Many public services and policies focus on individuals or were developed with traditional family structures in mind (e.g. Dad, Mum and children). These services may not work equally well for all types of households. In addition, some types of support are likely to work better when offered to whole households.
Examples of research that we would like to do include:
- Investigating if the siblings of children with complex long-term health conditions may benefit from extra help in school
- Understanding the health needs of single parents to improve early help for mental and physical health
- Evaluating the impact of family interventions for adolescent mental health on long-term health and school outcomes
What will we ask you in this session?
We would like to understand what you think about linking together (de-identified) records for people in the same household who are included in the ECHILD database. We’d also like to hear which areas of research using household links you think are most important.
A big thank you for your interest in our upcoming engagement group, we look forward to meeting in December.
