| Title: |
Consistency, completeness and external validity of ethnicity recording in NHS primary care records: a cohort study in 25 million patients' records at source using OpenSAFELY. |
| Authors: |
OpenSAFELY Collaborative; Andrews, CD; Mathur, R; Massey, J; Park, R; Curtis, HJ; Hopcroft, L; Mehrkar, A; Bacon, S; Hickman, G; Smith, R; Evans, D; Ward, T; Davy, S; Inglesby, P; Dillingham, I; Maude, S; O'Dwyer, T; Butler-Cole, BFC; Bridges, L; Bates, C; Parry, J; Hester, F; Harper, S; Cockburn, J; Goldacre, B; MacKenna, B; Tomlinson, LA; Walker, AJ; Hulme, WJ |
| Publisher Information: |
Springer Nature |
| Publication Year: |
2024 |
| Collection: |
Queen Mary University of London: Queen Mary Research Online (QMRO) |
| Subject Terms: |
Data curation; Electronic health records; Ethnicity; Primary care health sciences; Adult; Aged; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Cohort Studies; England; Primary Health Care; State Medicine; Infant; Newborn; Child; Preschool; Adolescent; Young Adult; 80 and over |
| Description: |
BACKGROUND: Ethnicity is known to be an important correlate of health outcomes, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, where some ethnic groups were shown to be at higher risk of infection and adverse outcomes. The recording of patients' ethnic groups in primary care can support research and efforts to achieve equity in service provision and outcomes; however, the coding of ethnicity is known to present complex challenges. We therefore set out to describe ethnicity coding in detail with a view to supporting the use of this data in a wide range of settings, as part of wider efforts to robustly describe and define methods of using administrative data. METHODS: We describe the completeness and consistency of primary care ethnicity recording in the OpenSAFELY-TPP database, containing linked primary care and hospital records in > 25 million patients in England. We also compared the ethnic breakdown in OpenSAFELY-TPP with that of the 2021 UK census. RESULTS: 78.2% of patients registered in OpenSAFELY-TPP on 1 January 2022 had their ethnicity recorded in primary care records, rising to 92.5% when supplemented with hospital data. The completeness of ethnicity recording was higher for women than for men. The rate of primary care ethnicity recording ranged from 77% in the South East of England to 82.2% in the West Midlands. Ethnicity recording rates were higher in patients with chronic or other serious health conditions. For each of the five broad ethnicity groups, primary care recorded ethnicity was within 2.9 percentage points of the population rate as recorded in the 2021 Census for England as a whole. For patients with multiple ethnicity records, 98.7% of the latest recorded ethnicities matched the most frequently coded ethnicity. Patients whose latest recorded ethnicity was categorised as Other were most likely to have a discordant ethnicity recording (32.2%). CONCLUSIONS: Primary care ethnicity data in OpenSAFELY is present for over three quarters of all patients, and combined with data from other sources can ... |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| File Description: |
288 - ? |
| Language: |
English |
| Relation: |
BMC Med; https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/101106 |
| DOI: |
10.1186/s12916-024-03499-5 |
| Availability: |
https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/101106; https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-024-03499-5 |
| Rights: |
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Reprints and permissions ; © 2023, the Author(s). Published by Springer Nature |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.2946C113 |
| Database: |
BASE |