Linking health and education data to plan and evaluate services for children

INTRODUCTION Linkage of routinely collected data from public services has the potential to improve how local health, education and social care are delivered to children. All mental health services, hospital-based child health services, schools and child protection services which serve the same local area could be more efficient if the design, monitoring, targeting and integration of services were based on data. Health services need evidence from the populations that they serve to plan care and know whether they are meeting children’s needs, duplicating effort or allowing some children to fall through the net. In this paper, we describe how the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) programme has joined up data from health, education and social services for children living in four local authorities in South London to create two datasets: one linking hospital to children’s mental health services and the second linking mental health data to education data. We describe these resources, give examples of how they are being used to improve services and discuss what is needed to implement this approach more widely across the UK.