Sub-series details: CRDA/24/DS/1996

This dataset was transferred from the Department of Health on a CD-ROM which was received by NDAD on 1 October 1999.

This dataset holds public health data issued in 1996. Further information about the Public Health Common data set is provided in the Series Catalogue and Dataset Documentation Catalogue. The sub-series consists of 7 datasets comprising a total of 835 tables, which contain various indicators for health regions in England and Wales.

For the first time, data are also provided for Local Authorities (LAs). The 1996 PHCDS provides, where possible, data for:

• Health Authorities (HAs) on the basis of boundaries in April 1996;
• District Health Authorities (DHAs) on the basis of boundaries in April 1995;
• Family Health Services Authorities (FHSAs);
• Local Authorities (LAs) on the basis of boundaries in December 1995;
• ONS area classification groups;
• Regional Offices on the basis of HA boundaries in April 1996 (where this is not feasible because of data constraints, Regional Health Authority data on the basis of April 1995 boundaries);
• Government Office Regions.

In April 1996, DHAs and FHSAs were merged into the new HAs as part of a re-organisation of the NHS. The number of HAs is 100, compared to 105 DHAs and 90 FHSAs in 1995. The eight RHAs became Regional Offices. A unique organisation code was assigned to each new organisation. The Regional Offices and their constituent Health Authorities and codes (as at April 1996) are listed here.

There are 11 ONS Area Classification Groups; a list of these, together with lists of the Local Authorities in each group, is provided in Appendix 3 of the 'Data definitions and user guide, supplementary data' (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/7/2).

The 1996 Data Set contains data on oral health indicators for the first time. Detailed descriptions of the indicators can be seen in the 'Data definitions and user guide' in the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/7/1-2.

The 1996 PHCDS, which was released in November 1996, was supplemented by a further "consolidation" release in March 1997; this latter release is held within NDAD as CRDA/24/DS/1996/7. The 'Data definitions and user guide' (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue , reference CRDA/24/DD/1/7/2) explains: "In recent years there have been a number of changes in health authority boundaries. These changes, and the numerous mergers, have resulted in a decline in number from almost 200 District Health Authorities (DHAs) in the early 1990s to 100 Health Authorities (HAs) by April 1996. The PHCDS has kept pace with these boundary changes, with each edition providing data for two sets of health authority boundaries: boundaries for the year in question and the preceding year respectively. The PHCDS has also addressed the issue of continuity by providing retrospective trend data for selected mortality-based indicators. However, due to the significant amount of computing entailed, retrospective data have not in the past been provided for other mortality based indicators, or for indicators relating to population, fertility, cancer registration, and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). The more radical reorganisation of health authorities from 105 DHAs in 1995 to 100 HAs in 1996 (which incorporate the functions of DHAs and FHSAs) resulted in complex mergers and splits, with few authorities remaining on the same boundaries. This most recent reorganisation provides an ideal opportunity to consolidate the contents of the PHCDS.

• Retrospective data not covered in the first phase of the PHCDS are provided (where possible) for HAs on 1996 boundaries and Local Authorities. The time series data include mortality based indicators not covered in the November 1996 release, and indicators relating to population, fertility, cancer registration, and HES. Thus, for the first time, trend data are presented for Health of the Nation cervical and skin cancer incidence indicators (HON-B2 and HON-B3).
• In addition, data are provided for a significantly expanded list of causes of death.
• Finally, Population Health Outcome indicators based on N cause and multicause mortality data have been updated (for the November 1996 PHCDS release, data were available only for 1993 and 1994; this release provides revised, updated data for 1993-95).

The tables in CRDA/24/DS/1996 were transferred to NDAD in the form of Symphony (WR1) spreadsheets, with the file names having meaningful prefixes to reflect the type of data. See CRDA/24/DD/1/7/1-2 for a more detailed explanation of the prefixes. These files were opened in Microsoft Excel 97 (under Windows 95/98). Visual Basic Macros were written to process them so that the headings, subheadings, other metadata, and blank columns or rows between the data were removed and the format of the cells set to Microsoft Excel General format before saving the data in CSV (Comma separated variable) format. In a number of the original files (within CRDA/24/DS/1996/3, CRDA/24/DS/1996/5 and CRDA/24/DS/1996/7), the data for each area is split over two lines. A Visual Basic module was written to move the figures so that there is one line per area. For an example of this type of table, see CRDA/24/DS/1996/3/1 (hna1t) by clicking on the image below:

Some additional processing was carried out on cda5 (CRDA/24/DS/1996/4/5) and cda5d (CRDA/24/DS/1996/4/32) which list the English Health Authorities classified hierarchically into 'families' and 'groups'; in order to retain the classification across the records, the 'families' and 'groups were copied into the appropriate, blank cells. In cda5l (CRDA/24/DS/1996/4/93), the Local Authorities within each of the ONS Area Classification Groups are listed in 3 columns; the entries were re-formatted in order that there is one record per area.

Some cells in the original spreadsheets contain real numbers but they are formatted to display as integers and others which have many figures after the decimal point are displayed with just 2 decimal places. In order to preserve the actual data, this formatting has been removed. However, it must be assumed that original users of the spreadsheets would have seen the data as it had been originally formatted. Although some files contain fields that have many decimal places, users are advised that NDAD recommends that all data in the PHCDS is not quoted at more than two decimal places. This is because fields are not formatted with more than two decimal places in the original spreadsheet files. NDAD assumes that this is because the data creators considered the data to be accurate to, at most, two decimal places. The field formats set by NDAD (DOUBLE or INTEGER) have been specified according to the data the cells contain, rather than how they are displayed within the original spreadsheet.

The PHCDS in its original format does not use specific field names as such: generally, spreadsheet packages do not require data to be held within named fields. (The indicators within PHCDS do have original names which have been preserved but these equate to the table name within NDAD). To identify fields within a table, the first field is named either H_CODE (if the data relates to HAs), D_CODE (if the data relates to DHAs), F_CODE (if it relates to FHSAs) or L_CODE (if it relates to LAs) and the second AREA (for the name of the area). The rest of the fields have been named sequentially, starting with the third field as F3, the fourth as F4 etc. These are not from the original data files but have been allocated by NDAD during the data conversion process. The column headings in the spreadsheet, supplemented at times by information from the 'Data definition and user guide', form the basis of the field descriptions. Where a spreadsheet contains one or more footnotes, the text was automatically extracted for inclusion in the relevant Table catalogue and is provided at the end of that catalogue under the heading 'Other information'.

No access conditions apply

The language of the materials is English.

Public Health Common data set data definitions and user guide for computer files relating to the dataset have been transferred to NDAD and can be consulted via the Dataset Documentation Catalogue.

The data has been divided into seven datasets by topic. For access to these datasets, see Links to dataset catalogues.

Where data availability allows, for each indicator there are four tables: one each for HAs, DHAs, FHSAs and LAs. The HA, DHA and FHSA files also contain data for Regional Offices, computed on the basis of HA boundaries in April 1996; where this is not feasible because of data constraints, Regional Health Authority data on boundaries of April 1995 are provided. The LA files contain data for Government Office Regions instead of Regional Office data. All four sets of files contain data for ONS area classification groups. However, the data for the ONS groups is computed on the basis of data for LAs in each group. This is not the case in the 1994 and 1995 PHCDS.

CRDA/24/DS/1996/7, which consists of data which was released some time after the publication of the main 1996 PHCDS and is described by the 'Data definitions and user guide' as the "consolidation" phase of the 1996 PHCDS, contains data for HAs on April 1996 boundaries and LAs. Correspondingly, there are two files for each indicator; both sets of files also contain data for ONS area classification groups (computed on the basis of data for LAs) and Regional Offices (computed on the basis of HA boundaries in April 1996).

Details of the sources which were used to produce the Public Health Common data files and how the data was checked by ONS are given in the Series Catalogue. For further information about the presentation of the data please see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue reference CRDA/24/DD/1/7 for further information.)

No discrepancies were noted in the original spreadsheet files as compared to the expected contents as described in the User Guide for the 1996 PHCDS, see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, references CRDA/24/DD/1/7/1-2. However, during processing/checking of the data, the following anomalies were noted:

In CRDA/24/DS/1996/2, the data in the tables covering indicators A8 and A9 data are only available to regional level and the regional data relates to the Standard Regions used by OPCS for statistical purposes. These Standard Regions (based on County boundaries which are not in general co-terminous with Health Authority areas; see the Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/7/1) have not been encoded at all in the tables and therefore tables CRDA/24/DS/1996/2/8 and CRDA/24/DS/1996/2/9 have not been included in the relationships set up by NDAD between the tables (to allow users to link data in similar tables within a dataset via the code for the area). Tables hna5b6 and hna10 (CRDA/24/DS/1996/2/5 and CRDA/24/DS/1996/2/10 respectively, which provide data for Regional Health Authorities with boundaries as at April 1995), and hna6 and hna7 (CRDA/24/DS/1997/2/6 and CRDA/24/DS/1997/2/7 respectively, which provide data for Regional Offices), also contain no codes for the area and therefore again have not been included in the relationships between the tables. The areas are also not coded in tables oha1, oha2 and oha3 (CRDA/24/DS/1996/4/60-62).

The codes used for areas differ in some tables and clearly this will affect linking of data between tables. For instance in dataset CRDA/24/DS/1996/2, tables hnd3m, hnd3md and hnd3mf hold data for for Regional Health Authorities (boundaries at April 1995) whereas other tables in this dataset hold data for Regional Offices; in the former the code for 'NORTHERN AND YORKSHIRE' is 'A00+B00' whereas in the latter the code is 'Y01'.

In CRDA/24/DS/1996/7, there are a number of tables (CRDA/24/DS/1996/7/1/14/1- CRDA/24/DS/1996/7/1/14/16 and CRDA/24/DS/1996/7/1/41/1- CRDA/24/DS/1996/7/1/41/16) which appear to have an incorrect indicator reference (CDS-C3C) in the titles of the spreadsheets: CDS-C3C does not appear in the 'Data definitions and user guide' (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/7/2) and this document lists these tables under indicator CDS-C3A. The text for indicator CDS-C3A has therefore been included in the Scope and Content section of the Table Catalogues for these tables.

Spot checks were carried out to compare the transformed data against the data in the original Symphony files. These included comparing the values of specific fields and checking that the totals of numeric fields were the same. In addition, each table was checked to ensure that the overall number of records and fields remained the same. No discrepancies were detected between the original and transformed data. The only differences found resulted from rounding and/or floating point representation, particularly for example where the original numbers had 12 figures after the decimal point. The transformed data is restricted to the level of accuracy provided by the general format in Excel (generally 8 figures after the decimal point).

Dataset catalogues provide more detailed information about individual datasets, and are currently available for the following dataset(s):