Sub-series details: CRDA/24/DS/1998

This datasets in this sub-series were transferred from the Department of Health on a CD-ROM which was received by NDAD on 1 October 1999.

This sub-series holds the Compendium of Clinical and Health Indicators (CCHI) containing a restructured Public Health Common dataset (PHCDS) for 1998, including Population Health Outcome indicators and Our Healthier Nation indicators. The sub-series also includes datasets containing details of populations for Primary Care Group (PCG) areas, selected data from the Health Surveys for England and Clinical Indicators published by the NHS Executive. The department indicated that it is likely that future editions of the CCHI will be expanded and may include data on Cancer Survival, Clinical Effectiveness, Primary Care Effectiveness and Environmental Risk Indicators, and the Operation-Specific Mortality Indicators1.

The PHCDS, comprising several subsets of indicators, forms a significant part of the CCHI. The 1998 PHCDS, providing data for years up to and including 1997, was released in its conventional format to Health Authorities in England in December 1998. It provided data for Health Authorities with boundaries as at April 1996 and for Local Authorities with boundaries as at April 1997. The 1998 PHCDS was subsequently restructured into the format of the CCHI, namely by reorganising the indicators by condition/health topic.

Further information about the CCHI is provided in the Series Catalogue and Dataset Documentation Catalogue. Similiar to the PHCDS, the CCHI provides health authorities with a 'common currency' for studying and comparing information about health.

The sub-series consists of 38 datasets, which contain various indicators for health regions in England and Wales.

Boundary changes

Local Authority boundary changes introduced in the 1997 PHCDS were complex and care should be taken when comparing data across the years. For further information about these changes, please see the 1997 Sub-series catalogue.

The 1998 PHCDS is restructured into the condition/health topic based format of the CCHI, and includes accompanying maps/graphs for selected indicators. The tables (where possible) provide data for:

• England and Wales
• England
• Regional Offices
• Government Office Regions
• ONS area classification groups
• Health Authorities (boundaries as of April 1996)
• Local Authorities (boundaries as of April 1997).

For each indicator, the data for all the above areas are supplied in one file, and not in separate files for Health and Local Authorities, as in previous years. The datafiles are broken down in to: England and Wales, England, 8 Regional Offices, 10 Government Office Regions, 11 ONS area classification groups, 100 Health Authorities and 357 local authorities.

The maps and graphs for selected indicators in the CCHI include:

• Maps illustrating variation in the indicator values according to Health Authority of residence. With a few exceptions, the choice of values assigned to a particular colour is designed to show percentage variation from the average for England on a consistent basis across maps, so that a particular colour generally represents the same percentage variation.
• Maps depicting the statistical significance of geographical variations in selected indicators. The choice of colours is designed to show particular categories of statistical significance on a consistent basis across all maps.
• Maps illustrating variation in local conditions (Jarman scores, DOE index of local conditions, ONS area classification).
• High-low graphs showing Health Authority variation within each ONS area classification group (where possible, otherwise Regional Office).
• Graphs showing trends in mortality in relation to values in the base year by Health Authority of residence.
• Bar graphs and pie charts for selected indicators (generally those based on small numbers).

For further information about the CCHI and subsequent changes, please see the data definitions and user guide for the CCHI in the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/9/2.

The tables in CRDA/24/DS/1998 were transferred to NDAD in the form of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. These files were opened in Microsoft Excel 97 (under Windows 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 with names ending in "t" , 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/1998/3/3/11 (073smp4t) by clicking on the image below:

Some cells in the original spreadsheets contain real numbers, but they are formatted to display as integers. 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 CCHI 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 CCHI in its original format did not use specific field names as such: generally, spreadsheet packages do not require data to be held within named fields. (The indicators within CCHI had 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 CODE (for the area code), 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 structure / content of the tables within dataset 38 (PCG populations) differs somewhat from datasets 1-37; the naming of the fields therefore, although along the same lines as for the other datasets, differs accordingly). 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 or other explanatory notes, 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'.

Further processing was required to produce the text for the 'Scope and content ' section of the Table Catalogues: a Visual Basic module was written to extract information from two documents, namely the "definition file" and the "matrix file" for each indicator.

A number of the indicators have PDF files containing maps or graphs relating to the indicator. For further information about the maps and graphs, see the data definitions and user guide (page 7) for the CCHI in the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/9/2. The maps/graphs can be accessed via the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/3/1. Basic information on the map/graph files for each indicator was extracted by a Visual Basic program from the indicator's matrix file for inclusion in the Documentation Catalogue.

In dataset CRDA/24/1998/37, tables 4 (hse01), 23 (hse07), 39 (hse12), 43 (hse13) and 50 (hse15) contain bar graphs and pie charts with data relating to "Persons". Images of these graphs/charts were printed to file and can be viewed via the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/4. The figures displayed in the worksheet from which the graph was derived ('Graph Persons') are picked up via links to data in the worksheet 'Persons': ie 'Graph Persons' appears to contain only data derived from the 'Persons' worksheet. Despite this, for completeness, the 'Graph Persons' worksheets have been preserved as separate tables. For an example of this type of table (CRDA/24/DS/1998/37/50 hse15_4GraphPersons), click on the image below:

No access conditions apply.

The language of the materials is English.

Data set data definitions and user guide for computer files relating to the 1998 CCHI have been transferred to NDAD and can be consulted via the Dataset Documentation Catalogue.

NDAD received 2 "versions" of the 1998 dataset: one in the same format as previous years, see the Series Catalogue for more details, the second within the CCHI.2 Since the 1998 PHCDS had been incorporated into the CCHI, a decision was taken that only the latter would be included within the NDAD archive. The data files were supplied in two formats, Lotus 1-2-3 (WK3) and Excel 97; only the Excel files were processed for preservation in the Archive.

The data is divided into 38 datasets by topic, which match the structure of the data as transferred to NDAD, namely 36 condition/health topic folders, plus 2 folders containing respectively the data for Health Authorities from the Health Surveys for England and the PCG population data. For access to these datasets, see Links to dataset catalogues. The 39th folder contained the Clinical Indicators publication ('Quality and performance in the NHS: Clinical Indicators', published by the NHS Executive in June 1999), which is preserved as documents CRDA/24/DD/5/2/1 and CRDA/24/DD/5/2/2. For further information on the structure of the data and documents, see the data definitions and user guide in the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/9/2.

Details of the sources which were used to produce the CCHI 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, see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/9.

No discrepancies were noted in the original spreadsheet files as compared to the expected contents as described in the data definitions and user guide for the 1998 CCHI, (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/9/2). However, during processing/checking of the data, the following points were noted:

In CRDA/24/1998/2, tables 049mn (CRDA/24/DS/1998/2/3) and 050pc (CRDA/24/DS/1998/2/3) contain 2 records for which there is no code for the area (ie 'BASES (ENGLAND)' as well as the standard 'ENGLAND AND WALES '); this affects the linking of data between these and other tables.

In CRDA/24/1998/4, certain tables do not have codes for the HA areas: the heading in the tables is 'HEALTH AUTHORITIES (mixture of boundaries as of April 1994 and April 1996)'. This will affect the linking of data between tables. The tables are: 115mnp1, 115mnp3, 116mnp1, 116mnp3, 117mnp1, 117mnp3, 118mnp1, 118mnp3, 119pcp1, 119pcp3, 120pcp1, 120pcp3, 121mnp1, 121mnp3, 122mnp1, 122mnp3, 123pcp1, 123pcp3 (CRDA/24/DS/1998/4/17/1 - CRDA/24/DS/1998/4/25/3). Note that: 121mnp2, which also has the heading "HEALTH AUTHORITIES (mixture of boundaries as of April 1994 and April 1996)," does contain codes for the Health Authorities.

096pc (CRDA/24/DS/1998/4/16) had ""#VALUE!"" in the cells relating to the following local authorities: Isles of Scilly, King's Lynn & West Norfolk, Corby, Kettering, Oxford and Vale of White Horse (there were no underlying formulae in these cells; presumably these had been overwritten by indicative error text at some stage prior to transfer for NDAD); these were replaced by blank entries. In 121mnp2 (CRDA/24/DS/1998/4/23/2), a number of the Regional Offices and Health Authorities have "*****"" and ""**"" in the numeric cells; similarly 122mnp2 (CRDA/24/DS/1998/4/24/2) and 123pcp2 (CRDA/24/DS/1998/4/25/2) have ""*****"" in the numeric cells relating to some Health Authorities. It is not apparent what these represent.

In CRDA/24/1998/37, the 'ONS Cluster' areas (Inner London, Mining & Industrial, Urban, Mature, Prosperous, Rural) do not have codes (ie there are multiple records with blank codes); this will affect the linking of tables.

In CRDA/24/1998/37 a small number of spreadsheets contain automatic links to information in other workbooks which were apparently not included with the original data as transferred to NDAD.

Spot checks were carried out to compare the transformed data against the data in the original Excel spreadsheets. 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):

1. Dataset Documentation catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/9/2, Compendium Of Clinical and Health Indicators, Data Definitions and User Guide for Computer Files pp 2

2. See the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/24/DD/1/9 for further information).