Scottish Public Health Drug Linkage Programme
- Drugs
The PHS Drugs Team is working on a routine linkage of drug-related health data sources.
This work aims to construct a linked dataset based on a cohort of people with problematic drug use.
This can be linked to other data sources to generate indicators or outcome data for this population.
This work utilises routinely collected PHS-held administrative data on:
- hospital admissions
- specialist drug treatment episodes
- prescriptions
- death registrations
Appropriate Information Governance approvals are in place for all work associated with this project.
This database will help PHS to address a wide range of public health surveillance questions, such as:
- the size and composition of the population with a drug use problem
- mortality and morbidity among people with a drug use problem
- impact of specialist drug treatment and care
Linkage of routinely collected administrative data is vital in enhancing public health surveillance in this area.
This work supports improvements in drug harms monitoring and the evaluation of policy and practice at both local and national levels
Contact
Email phs.drugsteam@phs.scot for enquiries about data linkage.