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- BLOG - Access to secure data during the Covid-19 pandemic - a model for the future?
- Covid-19 and Care Homes: Advances in Administrative Data Research during the pandemic
- DATA INSIGHTS -Deprivation and informal care at the end of life
- BLOG - Reflections on engaging with children & young people about data
- NEWS - Innovative new residential linkage tool launched
- BLOG SERIES - Dramatic increase in deaths at home- No.4
- DATA INSIGHTS - Youth Movements, Social Mobility and Health Inequalities
- NEWS - New report warns of deepening poverty crisis for Scottish families
- New report on Infants Born into Care in Scotland
- Spotlight on Dr Elizabeth Lemmon
- Spotlight on Jan Savinc
- BLOG - Covid-19 fines in Scotland: What we know so far
- BLOG - The value of social science and administrative data research in Scotland: how we are helping respond to COVID-19
- NEWS - Joining together with Research Data Scotland to co-host existing public panel on data
- DATA INSIGHTS - Exploring illegal drug consignments in Scotland
- DATA INSIGHTS -Linking two administrative data sets about looked after children
- NEWS - ADR UK grants 20 PhD studentship opportunities focused on quantitative research using linked administrative data
- NEWS – ADR Scotland data ambassadors launched
- Spotlight on Peter Christen
- The importance of administrative data
- Virtual Conference - Data Linkage: Information to Impact
- An Introduction to Data Science for Administrative Data Research course - March 2023
- BLOG SERIES - Dramatic increase in deaths at home - No.7
- BLOG SERIES - Dramatic increase in deaths at home
- BLOG SERIES - Dramatic increase in deaths at home- No.3
- DATA INSIGHTS - Investigating the effects of class composition and class size on pupils’ attainment in Scottish primary schools
- NEWS - New opportunity to join ADR Scotland’s Public Panel
- BLOG - Engaging the public through our public panel
- BLOG - Exploring the potential of synthetic data
- Children’s Health in Care in Scotland (CHiCS)
- DATA INSIGHTS - Automatic Coding of Occupations: Methods to create the Scottish Historic Population Database (SHPD)
- DATA INSIGHTS - Selective schools: do they improve health?
- DATA INSIGHTS - Were people who died at home less likely to attend hospital at the end of life during the Covid pandemic?
- EVENT - Active Travel: New Data, New Insights
- EVENT - Holyrood Evidence Week: Doing Data Better for Policy and Public Good
- EVENT - Unlocking criminal justice data in Scotland: Findings from Data First
- IPDLN Conference - Data linkage research: informing policy and practice
- NEWS - Making nursing data available to inform policy
- NEWS - New report on The Impact of Covid-19 on Children’s Care Journeys in Scotland: An Analysis of the Administrative Data on 'Looked After' Children
- NEWS - Updated report on Infants Born into Care in Scotland
- Scout and Guide participation boosts later life health
- BLOG - Geospatial Ambitions
- BLOG - Taking historical death records and developing a database for future analysis
- BLOG - Unlocking criminal justice data
- DATA INSIGHTS - Community mortality due to Covid-19
- DATA INSIGHTS - What makes people more likely to cycle to work?
- Future-proofing investment into administrative data research announced in Scotland
- NEWS - Understanding the dynamics of the nursing workforce: the potential of routinely collected data
- Spotlight on Joanna Soraghan
- Spotlight on Katherine Falconer
- Why misconceptions about population data can lead to bad outcomes
- ADR Scotland publishes its strategy for 2022-2026
- BLOG - Developing and re-shaping our public panel
- BLOG - Review of the recent DWP Areas of Research Interest Workshop
- BLOG: Developing a cross-national research agenda on crime and convictions
- BLOG: Working together to make a difference with data
- DATA INSIGHTS - Homelessness duration in Scotland: how long does rehousing take?
- DATA INSIGHTS - Occupation and COVID-19 deaths: Scotland in a comparative perspective
- DATA INSIGHTS -The health and economic benefits of active commuting in Scotland
- EVENT - ADR UK Conference 2023
- EVENT - RSE The secret world of data
- NEWS - New comic on children's rights and data
- NEWS - Report published on our children’s engagement pilot study
- NEWS - When did fines issued by the police for breaking Covid rules peak?
- Scotland’s portfolios: Research and Statistical Data - building a new approach to thematic data linkage
- Spotlight on Cecilia Macintyre
- Spotlight on Dr Evan Williams
- Spotlight on Fernando Pantoja
- Spotlight on Laurie Berrie
- ADR Scotland Winter Partnership Session - **internal event**
- BLOG - AGEING AND HOMELESSNESS IN SCOTLAND
- BLOG - Can we use linked administrative data to identify social disadvantage?
- BLOG - Commuting and its impact on health
- BLOG - The Dynamics of the Nursing Workforce in the UK: Using data to support our nurses
- BLOG: Growing up in kinship care
- Congratulations to Alastair McAlpine, the new Chief Statistician for Scottish Government
- DATA INSIGHTS - Analysing a season of death and excess mortality in Scotland’s past
- EVENT - ADR UK Virtual Half Day event
- EVENT - HDR UK Conference: Data for global health and society
- EVENT - Introduction to Data Science for Administrative Data Research course (IDS-ADR)
- Event - Public data for public good: towards better understanding children's lives
- NEWS - ADR Scotland's first flagship dataset
- NEWS - Data research initiative secures £90 m funding extension
- NEWS: Our role supporting the new Covid-19 research data service in Scotland
- Spotlight on Gina Anghelescu
- Spotlight on Michelle K Jamieson
- Webinar - An Introduction to Looked-After Children Dataset
- ADR Scotland Away Day (**for staff only**)
- BLOG - An Inside Job: Using Criminology, Police Data and a Lot of Nouse
- BLOG - Improving justice data to promote data justice in Scotland
- BLOG - Location of death in 2020: a changing trend from hospitals to homes
- BLOG - Reflecting on the ADR UK Conference: Insights from our new PhD Researchers
- BLOG - Seeking feedback on Research Data Scotland’s core principles via our public panel
- BLOG - What skills, training and support are required by those wishing a career as an administrative data researcher?
- BLOG No. 9 - Final blog in this 'deaths at home' series
- BLOG SERIES - Dramatic increase in deaths at home - No. 6
- BLOG SERIES - Dramatic increase in deaths at home - No.8
- BLOG SERIES - Dramatic increase in deaths at home- No.5
- BLOG: 5 things I've learnt about working with policymakers...
- BLOG: Automating Coding for Large Historical Datasets
- BLOG: COVID-19- How increased deaths at home impact the carer community
- DATA INSIGHTS -Postal deliveries of drugs in Scotland
- EVENT - 'Getting things done with data in government'
- EVENT - Linking public sector data for research: an ADR UK showcase event
- EVENT Seminar - Administrative data for social policy research: potential and pitfalls
- NEWS - ADR Scotland launches new podcast series
- NEWS - Additional funding for Understanding Children’s Lives and Outcomes
- NEWS - Engaging children and young people
- NEWS: Police use of Fixed Penalty Notices under the Covid-19 regulations in Scotland: A new data report highlights links with deprivation and inequality
- NEWS: Police use of the new Covid-19 powers: Using administrative data to analyse and evaluate practice
- Research Data Scotland - New user forum
- Spotlight on Dr Patricio Troncoso
- Spotlight on Renata Samulnik
- Summary of ADR Scotland Winter Partnership session
- Directorship of the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN) for 2021-22.
- BLOG: In the light of experience: InterRAI and the final thousand days of life
- Multiple health conditions and social care
- NEWS - Susan McVie elected as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences
- SCADR relocates to the Bayes Centre
- EVENT: Four day introduction to using administrative data for social and health research
- BLOG: The value of administrative data: DALYs and the Scottish Burden of Disease study
- BLOG: Where to start with parliamentary and policy engagement
- EVENT - International Conference on Administrative Data Research, Cardiff
- EVENT - Using data to realise the potential of the 'Last 1000 days'
- EVENT: TalkingData: ADR Scotland mini-summit
- EVENT: “Let’s use data to save time, money and lives”: ADR Scotland partners gather for mini-summit
- EVENTS: ADR Scotland researchers present at international conference in Cardiff
BLOG No. 9 - Final blog in the 'deaths at home' series
This is my 9th blog and wraps up my blog series looking at increased deaths at home during the pandemic.
Whilst the pandemic isn’t over, I think it is an appropriate time to end this blog series, as there is now a strong interest in better understanding and investigating deaths in people’s own homes during the pandemic. This is highlighted by this recent letter from Hospice UK, and we are confident that this blog series has contributed to creating awareness of this issue and that our full data linkage research project will continue to do so from a Scottish perspective.
Update from publicly available data from NRS
As you can see from the graph above, the current level of home deaths remains above the 2015-2019 average, with similar April numbers to the same time last year. During February and March this year it looked like home death levels were declining but they have since risen to levels as high as in April in both 2020 and 2021. On the other hand, the number of Covid-related home deaths has dropped compared to both 2020 and 2021. The peak in Covid deaths at home seen at the end of 2020 and start of 2021 has not repeated in 2022.
For those readers who still wish to access the NRS data, the National Records Scotland update their publicly available data weekly and you can see the code I used for this blog series in the github repository: https://github.com/jsavinc/covid_nrs_place_of_death.
Query from Blog 8 on NHS Borders 'other' deaths
Finally, the mystery from the previous blog 8 post has been solved. The higher proportion of deaths registered in an ‘Other’ location in NHS Borders compared to other health boards is due to the way NHS institutions are coded. The Margaret Kerr Unit 1, a specialist palliative care unit in the Borders, is coded as C – Clinic premises 2, which is included in the 'Other place of death'3 using National Records Scotland (NRS) coding. I spent a good while looking through the list of institutions wondering which of these could possibly explain this, but my colleague Dr Geraldine Finnan4 knew the answer, having worked in the Borders previously. This demonstrates the importance of domain expertise when doing data science – I couldn’t have inferred that from the (publicly) available data alone.
Linked data project: Deaths at home
In October 2021, I made a request to study a dataset linking death records during the first year of the pandemic and the five years prior with health usage records – hospitalisation, cancer registrations, and unscheduled care data (NHS24, A&E, Ambulance call-outs, and Out-of-hours GP visits). This was approved at the end of the year, and the first batch of data were delivered to the Safe Haven in February 2022, I’ve since started checking what’s there and cleaning the data to get it ready for analysis.
I will provide a blog or news article in the coming months, to provide an update of how this research is progressing - so this is not the last you will hear from me!
- http://www.nhsborders.scot.nhs.uk/patients-and-visitors/our-services/general-services/specialist-palliative-care-and-the-margaret-kerr-unit/
- https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/vital-events/institution-codes-october-2021.xlsx
- https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/covid19/covid-deaths-21-methodology.pdf, Location of death heading on page 4
- https://www.napier.ac.uk/people/geraldine-finnan
This article was published on 13 Apr 2022