10  Mother-baby Linkage in ECHILD

The ECHILD team are in the process of creating a ‘mother-baby’ link, whereby HES delivery and birth records for both mother and baby will be linked together using a probabilistic linkage algorithm (Harron et al., 2016). In summary, the probabilistic linkage approach uses ‘indirect identifiers’, i.e., information from the maternity and baby tails within HES (such as gestational age and birth weight) to link together mother-baby dyads. Previous work has demonstrated high linkage rates using this approach [harron2016a]. 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.

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