The development of standardised hospital emergency department record systems would provide the potential to monitor changes in the incidence and cause of injury and to monitor inequalities in injury occurrence.
Routine datasets, such as Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), provide the potential to monitor inequalities in process and outcome measures of inpatient treatment.
The main limitation of using routine data to monitor inequalities on a trust level was that the study was underpowered.
This study explored whether routine data can be used to monitor inequalities in an acute trust based on a case study.
This study focuses on exploring to what extent routine data can be used to explore and monitor inequalities in the care provided by an acute trust.
Collection The quality and availability of disaggregated data play an important role in determining a country's capacity to monitor inequalities, as they are the inputs for analyses and reporting.
Overall we conclude that there are challenges in using routine data to monitor inequalities at this level due to limitations in sample size that reduce the power to detect differences.
We measured inequalities in access (waiting times), process (length of stay) and outcome (readmission) by age, sex, ethnicity and social deprivation for seven common procedures at a single large acute trust, and examined whether such data could usefully be applied more generally to monitor inequalities at the trust level.
The main aim of this work was to explore the feasibility of monitoring inequalities not inequities, however the inequalities may be providing equity.
We explore the feasibility of monitoring inequalities within an acute trust using routine data.
However, there is no standard system for monitoring inequalities in the care provided by acute trusts.
