Introduction to Hospital Episode Statistics

Course Summary

This course will provide participants with an
understanding of how Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data are collected and
coded, their structure, and how to clean and analyse HES data. A key focus will
be on developing an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of HES data,
how inconsistencies arise, and approaches to deal with these. Participants will
also learn how to ensure individuals’ anonymity and confidentiality when
analysing and publishing using HES. The course consists of a mixture of
lectures and practicals for which participants will use Stata software to clean
and analyse HES data.

Target
Audience

Researchers at all levels in academia, government
and private sector at all levels who are using/planning to use Hospital Episode
Statistics in their work.

Pre-requisites

Participants will write and execute
programmes in Stata during the practical sessions. Previous experience of
programming in Stata, R or SAS will therefore be helpful, but Stata code and
instructions will be provided to all participants. There are no pre-requisites
for the lectures.

Further
course details can be found here. 

More information regarding our courses can be found here.

Podcast for some of our previous courses can be found here.

Course Leader: Dr Pia Hardelid

Course contents

The course covers:

• HES data collection and coding
• HES data structure
• How to clean and manage HES data
• How to ensure anonymity and
  confidentiality
• How to carry out basic analyses using HES
  data
• Sources of variation in HES data
• How to apply for HES data

By the end of the course
participants will:

• understand how and why
  HES data are collected
• become aware of the
  strength and weaknesses of using HES data for research
• learn how to carry out
  basic cleaning, management and analysis tasks using HES data

• learn how to ensure anonymity and confidentiality
  when using HES