Dr Louise Mc Grath-Lone, 'Making administrative health data 'research-ready''

Dr Louise Mc Grath-Lone was part of a stakeholder event that brought together data owners, policy makers and researchers to discuss the development of the Education and Child Health Insights.

Administrative data - information that is routinely collected by organisations for operational reasons - are a valuable resource for research to inform policy and practice.

However, compared to other countries, administrative data are under-utilised as a research resource in the UK due to technical and governance barriers which limit their use. For example, administrative datasets can be difficult and time-consuming to access and often require a lot of cleaning and preparation before they can be used for research.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest and financial investment by the government in making administrative data research-ready; however, there it is not clear what the term “research-ready” actually means.

For the Fellowship, Louse is working with Administrative Data Research (ADR) UK, which promotes the benefits of administrative data research and engages with UK Government to support safe and secure access to administrative data for research to inform policy decisions that improve people’s lives.

Working with ADR UK, she was part of a stakeholder event that brought together data owners, policy makers and researchers to discuss the development of the Education and Child Health Insights from Linked Data (ECHILD) Database, a research-ready administrative data sources that includes linked health, education and social care data for all children in England born since 1^st September 1995.

Louise worked with ADR UK to co-author a report that described the key messages from this event, which has now been published. Louise also wrote a blog about the event for the ADR UK website and created an infographic about the ECHILD Database.

Currently, Louise and ADR UK are working to organise another roundtable to discuss the defining characteristics of research-ready administrative data with data providers, policy makers and researchers, with a view to developing the consensus that is needed to collaboratively develop common principles and standards.