10  Mother-baby Linkage in ECHILD

The ECHILD team have created a ‘mother-baby’ link (Feng et al., 2024a), whereby HES delivery and birth records for both mother and baby are linked together using a probabilistic linkage algorithm (Harron et al., 2016). In summary, the probabilistic linkage approach uses ‘indirect identifiers’ (such as gestational age and birth weight) to link together mother-baby dyads. Previous work has demonstrated high linkage rates using this approach (Feng et al., 2024b). The mother-baby linkage means that it is possible within ECHILD to look at how maternal characteristics (including those captured in health, education and social care datasets) are related to child outcomes. It is also possible to identify sibling clusters.

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