Defining and creating 'spells' and 'continuous inpatient spells' (cips) in ECHILD

[AMJ-coder]

Question / Problem statement

How have other researchers approached the definition of 'spells' and 'cips' in ECHILD. Do you used the NHS Digital approach or the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) approach to this?

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[zcabh35]

Howdy

This depends on what you are looking for. At CHIG (The Child Health Informatics Group) we say this depends on what you want to look at - for us we often use spells where hospital transfers are considered part of one admission

We do use a variation of the NHS Digital Approach, but some people just use dates rather than discharge methods plus dates.

We have some code here on cleaning HES APC Dates and then adding in admission numbers up to line 142 as well as spells up to line 268: [https://github.com/UCL-CHIG/Palivizumab/blob/main/1%20-%20cleaning%20-%20all%20hospitalisation%20history.txt]

[LucyGoldsmith]

I think this paper is useful for defining continuous inpatient spells (CIPS) (which include hospital transfers).

CHERP182_NHS_update2018_2019_supplementary.pdf