This webinar is part of the Power of Population Data Science Series
Several countries have developed national immunisation registers, but only the Nordic countries have linked their registers to other health data in order to comprehensively evaluate the ‘real world’ effectiveness of vaccines. Nordic countries can link data sets deterministically using the national person identifier, but most countries, including Australia, don’t have such an identifier to enable this type of linkage.
This presentation will describe how an Australian research group assembled national death and immunisation databases along with state health data for a cohort of children born between 1996 and 2012 in two states (Western Australia and New South Wales) to enable the conduct of population-based studies related to immunisation and immunisation policy. Details of the data sources used, how the cohort was assembled, the quality of the probablistic linkage, strengths and limitations of the linkage system developed and how it compares with systems developed in Nordic countries will be discussed. Plans for analysis and recommendations for future linkages will be touched on. The talk should be of interest to researchers in other countries with national immunisation registers looking to establish similar systems.
View original IJPDS article at: https://ijpds.org/article/view/406
Watch recorded presentation below.
Please take a few minutes to complete our online survey. Your feedback will help shape future webinar series!
Speakers
Dr. Heather F Gidding is an infectious diseases epidemiologist with a broad interest in conducting high-quality quantitative epidemiological studies to inform public health practice, especially around infectious disease burden and control by vaccination in vulnerable populations and Aboriginal children. She is passionate about maximising the use of routinely collected data for epidemiological research, in particular using data linkage methods. She is currently conducting research using linked health and vaccine coverage data for two Australian states to look at who is more likely to have delayed vaccine uptake and why, as well as measure the ‘real world’ vaccine effectiveness in different population groups.
Dr. Hannah Moore is Program Head, Infections and Vaccines and Head of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Team within the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, Australia. Her passion for research involves using large population-based datasets to investigate how to prevent and reduce serious respiratory and other infectious diseases in children. Dr Moore has developed expertise in the epidemiology of paediatric infectious diseases, focusing on respiratory infections using data linkage methodologies. She established the first ever linkages with routine microbiology data to population-based administrative health datasets in WA. Using these data, which includes the only population-based RSV dataset in Australia, Dr Moore pioneered the first dynamic transmission model for RSV using these unique data. She is developing knowledge of how best to identify pathogen-specific burden of disease using administrative data. She has contributed to maternal influenza vaccination policy through showing that antenatal influenza vaccine does not result in adverse birth outcomes and is currently contributing to national seasonal influenza vaccination policy though her involvement in a collaborative network across Australia. Dr Moore is the WA lead on the first national study investigating real-world vaccine effectiveness of routine immunisations in birth cohorts from WA and NSW.
