Data Quality Improvement, Data Linkage and Multiple Imputation in the UK National Vascular Database

Abstract

The National Vascular Database (NVD) is a prospective audit database collecting information of the quality of care and outcomes of patients admitted to acute hospitals in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland with several vascular disorders. The NVD has proved to be an important resource for clinical audit but by contrast its potential as a valuable research tool remains under exploited.

We demonstrate proof-of-principle linkage of the NVD to Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and UK Statistics Authority data. We present and validate Multiple Imputation (MI) methods to address problems with missingness in the linked dataset, focusing on a specific risk model. MI is applied to these linked data to extend the chosen risk model to long term mortality outcomes.