Researcher Experience: Dr Feifei Bu

Overview of my research

My work using administrative data has been mainly around health service utilisation. Collaborating with colleagues from Stirling and Dundee, we had looked at the cost of hospital admissions for people with cognitive spectrum disorders using SMR data. In 2019, I worked on a project on the relationships between social factors and health outcomes amongst older adults using ELSA linked with HES. We looked at how loneliness and social isolation were associated with the risk of hospitalisation related to fall, cardiovascular disease and respiratory disease respectively. More recently, I led a project looking at how patient activation (a measure of people’s knowledge, skills and confidence to manage their own health and wellbeing) was related to the usage of different health care services, including GP and non-GP primary care, elective and emergency inpatient admissions, outpatient and A&E attendances. At the moment, I am involved in an ESRC funded project looking at how indoor temperature is related to secondary care health service utilisation using ELSA linked with HES.

Summary of any challenges faced

Unlike survey data that are usually thoroughly cleaned and well documented, administrative data often require some extra work. Based on my own experience, for example, the episode order variable comes with the SMR or HES data cannot be taken for granted. In some cases, it could be important to further sort them into the correct order. Also, it may take some detective work to find out what a specific variable measures or how data were collected in practice and by who—this could be critical for data interpretation.

A unique strength of administrative data is that they offer objective and detailed measures that are usually unavailable in surveys. However, as these data were not collected for research purposes, there is often a lack of other critical information that we would like to take into account in our research. If data linkage is not possible, this is an even tougher challenge than the one above.

Due to data protection purposes, administrative data often need to be analysed in a safe setting, like a data safe haven. This can usually be accessed via a remote desktop connection, but in some cases, you might need to go to a secure access point that is not necessarily local. This will slow down your progress significantly. Some administrative data are stored in data warehouses, in which case researchers need to extract data that are relevant to them using programming language, like SQL. In other instances, researchers may not have access to the data warehouse directly and data extraction need to be done by a data analyst. This would require a lot of planning ahead as well as communication back and forth. Finally, data access is time-limited in most cases. It may ‘expire’ before getting everything published. This is something that needs to be taken into account when applying for data access.

Working with administrative data is like learning to tame a dragon—albeit challenging, it is also exciting and rewarding!

Thoughts for fellow and future eCRUSADers

As previous Researcher Experience posts have mentioned already, the access application can take a long time to go through. It is important to plan ahead especially if you are on a tight schedule—either for your PhD or other funded projects.

It is important to acknowledge the limitations of administrative data, in particular, the lack of critical information that need to be ‘controlled for’ in analyses. We should not rule out the possibility that survey data may serve our research purposes better. Here is a note to myself, and to be shared with eCRUSADers: our passion for data should not outweigh a solid research design.