The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is a Non-Ministerial Government Department; it is the UK's largest independent producer of official statistics and is the recognized National Statistical Institute.
In this session, Emma Rourke, Director of Health Analysis and Pandemic Insights at ONS, will outline how the organization leveraged large-scale linked administrative data assets alongside ambitious survey data collection, including wide scale biological sampling, to offer unique evidence and insights that have informed the UK's pandemic response. Emma will detail how ONS stood-up the gold-standard longitudinal Coronavirus Infection Survey (CIS) in April 2020, offering trusted regular estimates of Covid-19 infection and immunity across all four nations of the UK.
The survey tracked the natural history of Covid-19 infection and immunity over the past 2 years, including asymptomatic infections, recruiting over 267,000 unique households and collecting 8 million swabs and 2 million blood samples. Emma will also outline ONS' use of large-scale linked data assets in pandemic response, including linkage of England and Wales Census data to CIS, diagnostic Covid testing records from NHS Test and Trace, National Immunisation Records, death registrations, and Primary/Secondary Healthcare datasets.
This large-scale linkage enabled high-profile analyses, for example, ONS' award-winning work on Covid mortality by ethnicity, and fast-paced releases on vaccination uptake by occupation during the recent Omicron surge. Looking beyond the pandemic, ONS will make use of the opportunities afforded by Census 2021 linked data assets to explore the social, environmental, and economic determinants of health, as well as thinking ahead to how existing and new administrative and survey data sources can help us meet the future demands for evidence around population health.
Finally, Emma will discuss how ONS is partnering nationally and internationally with academics, government, and the third sector to deliver maximum value from our linked data, including details of our Secure Research Service and the upcoming cross-government Integrated Data Service. ONS will continue to use relationships established during the pandemic to build radical, ambitious, and inclusive health datasets to reach populations that may not be typically captured by NSI outputs and achieve ONS' vision to produce statistics for the public good.
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Presenter
Emma Rourke MSc is Director of Health Analysis and Pandemic Insight at ONS, leading a portfolio of workstreams including the flagship Coronavirus Infection Survey. Emma joined ONS in 2016 as Director of Public Policy Analysis and was previously Director of Intelligence at the Care Quality Commission. She is a member of the Centre for Applied Data Ethics Advisory Committee. Emma's background is in healthcare practice where her area of interest was clinical risk management, audit, and analytics.