Current Projects
THE PHRN PROOF OF CONCEPT COLLABORATION (#1)
One of the most fundamental goals of improving quality of hospital care is avoiding unnecessary deaths. To date most of the standard reviews performed around hospital-related deaths have focused on those related to post-surgical events. However to be able to get a picture of a hospital's performance overall, there is an increasing need to be able to also measure hospital-related deaths due to any cause.
This method of quality assessment used together with other performance measures provides a useful starting point for enhancing hospital performance and accountability.
The PHRN Proof of Concept Collaboration #1 is the first of its kind in Australia to link hospital admissions data with hospital-related deaths data across different states.
The Collaboration will involve linking data collections from New South Wales (NSW) and Western Australia (WA) via the PHRN Centre for Data Linkage (CDL) located at Curtin University in Western Australia. (read more about the CDL)
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
The Proof of Concept Collaboration #1 serves two main purposes:
- To develop and test the data transfer and linkage processes required for the PHRN to link and provide researcher access to data from more than one state or territory,
- To demonstrate the value of these linkages in informing a public health issue of national importance related to death during hospital admission or within 30-days of discharge.
SCIENTIFIC AIMS OF THE STUDY
- To identify the characteristics and diagnosis categories of patients dying during their stay in hospital or within 30-days of being discharged,
- To examine the timing of death among people alive at discharge from hospital who died within 30 days,
- To identify whether the primary reason for admission to hospital is listed on the death certificate of patients who die within 30-days post-discharge,
- To explore cross-border flows by looking at the number of patients who are treated in hospital in one state and die in another within 30 days of discharge.
DATA TO BE LINKED
This investigation involves extracting and linking together all hospital admission records and all death registrations for NSW and WA over the period 2004/05 to 2008/09. The focus of the analysis is on patients who died within 30 days of being admitted to hospital, making sure that all of the hospital records and the death record for the same person have been joined together, wherever events have occurred.
The national CDL will create linkage keys that will be used to link records from the same patient between data collections. The CDL will provide the project linkage keys to the relevant data custodians who hold the original data collections. The data custodians will match the linkage keys to the hospital admission and death records, remove the personal identifying information and provide the anonymous data to the approved data analyst to undertake the research.
