ArticleJournal of public health (Oxford, England)2024
Quality of ethnicity data within Scottish health records and implications of misclassification for ethnic inequalities in severe COVID-19: a national linked data study.
Article in Journal of public health (Oxford, England), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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7 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- The dilemma of using racial and ethnic categories in biomedical research.BMC medical research methodology · 2026Article
- Association of Adverse Childhood Experiences With Health-Related Quality of Life and Quality-Adjusted Life-Years Among Adolescents in the United Kingdom: Findings From Two General Population Cohorts.Alpha psychiatry · 2026Article
- Recognition and Risk: Ethnic Monitoring, Healthcare Access and Everyday Discrimination in Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller Communities in the UK.Sociology of health & illness · 2026Article
- Investigating the contribution of socio-economic position to ethnic inequalities in severe COVID-19 outcomes: population-based mediation analyses of national linked Scottish data.European journal of public health · 2025Article
- Article
- Are ethnic inequalities in COVID-19 outcomes mediated by occupation risk? Analyses of a 2-year record linked national cohort study in Scotland.European journal of public health · 2025Article
- Understanding the quality of ethnicity data recorded in health-related administrative data sources compared with Census 2021 in England.PLoS medicine · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
27 authors at 10 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundWe compared the quality of ethnicity coding within the Public Health Scotland Ethnicity Look-up (PHS-EL) dataset, and other National Health Service datasets, with the 2011 Scottish Census.
methodsMeasures of quality included the level of missingness and misclassification. We examined the impact of misclassification using Cox proportional hazards to compare the risk of severe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) (hospitalization & death) by ethnic group.
resultsMisclassification within PHS-EL was higher for all minority ethnic groups [12.5 to 69.1%] compared with the White Scottish majority [5.1%] and highest in the White Gypsy/Traveller group [69.1%]. Missingness in PHS-EL was highest among the White Other British group [39%] and lowest among the Pakistani group [17%]. PHS-EL data often underestimated severe COVID-19 risk compared with Census data. e.g. in the White Gypsy/Traveller group the Hazard Ratio (HR) was 1.68 [95% Confidence Intervals (CI): 1.03, 2.74] compared with the White Scottish majority using Census ethnicity data and 0.73 [95% CI: 0.10, 5.15] using PHS-EL data; and HR was 2.03 [95% CI: 1.20, 3.44] in the Census for the Bangladeshi group versus 1.45 [95% CI: 0.75, 2.78] in PHS-EL.
conclusionsPoor quality ethnicity coding in health records can bias estimates, thereby threatening monitoring and understanding ethnic inequalities in health.
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