Linkage of National Congenital Heart Disease Audit data to hospital, critical care and mortality national data sets to enable research focused on quality improvement.

We successfully linked four national data sets to the core data set of all CHD procedures performed between 2000 and 2017. This will enable a much richer analysis of longitudinal patient journeys and outcomes. We hope that our detailed description of the linkage process will be useful to others looking to link national data sets to address important research priorities.