The Introductory Analysis of Linked Health Data was an intensive five-day course on the theory and practice of analysis of large sets of linked health and social data at an introductory to intermediate level.

Presented by Professor David Preen, Swansea University

Rapid growth in data linkage projects has led to a shortfall in analyst skills. Some researchers understand epidemiological principles, but are unfamiliar with the specialised computing skills needed to analyse linked data files.

Others have a strong grasp of computing concepts, but lack an adequate theoretical base to design high quality applications to answer research questions. This course endeavoured to fill a gap in training opportunities to cater to these two areas of need.

The course catered to users of SPSS, SAS or Stata with course materials and exercises covering all three statistical software packages.  The course provided a theoretical grounding in the classroom on each topic, followed by a practical training session on the corresponding computing solutions.