Improving efficiency and underpinning transparency in research: enhancing research resources via a research repository

This section contains computer code used to filter and prepare data sets, and other resources, obtained from the Ministry of Health. The availability of this information allows users of these data to save considerable resources by not having to replicate data manipulation work that has already been undertaken elsewhere.

The Ministry of Health (MoH) maintains hospital discharge data through a large database called the National Minimum Dataset (NMDS). Before performing the required analyses, the MoH carries out a number of steps in order to filter the data and achieve this ability to make valid comparisons across different data collections. The process is described in the following sections and SAS code detailing each step is included.