Use of national clinical databases for informing and for evaluating health care policies

There are a number of high quality national clinical databases that were not routinely used for policy evaluation. PIRU was interested to assess their potential for use in policy and programme evaluations.

We wanted to understand the barriers and enablers to policy-makers and analysts making use of existing national datasets to inform or evaluate policy.

We undertook a review which scoped the range and availability of large, national health and social care datasets and examined issues to do with accessing and linking these datasets.

We also examined how clinical datasets have been used by policy-makers to inform national health care policies in England; identified examples of their application in evaluating policies; and suggested ways in which policy-makers may make greater use of these datasets.

There was considerable potential to make better use of national clinical databases as the examples discussed in our report showed.