Public Health Scotland Metadata Catalogue
The metadata catalogue has been developed by Public Health Scotland to provide metadata on easily accessible, publicly available health and wellbeing indicators for Scotland. It provides information on what data is available, but the metadata catalogue does not provide the actual data. It has been developed to make it easier to find and use existing intelligence for learning and decision-making related to health and wellbeing.
The catalogue includes data from Public Health Scotland, as well as from other data owners such as the Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland and the Scottish Government.
Indicators from each publication are grouped by health and wellbeing category, providing an overview of available metrics by topic. Each indicator has a metadata profile that provides available details on that item, for example, frequency of data updates, categorical breakdowns and data source. The dashboard allows quick identification of relevant metrics across a wide range of topic areas and sources, rather than searching multiple places.
How did we decide what indicators to include?
- Easily accessible: It is accessible in a dashboard or report. Indicators that require data manipulation of the parent dataset to extract the data have not been included.
- Contemporary: The metadata catalogue includes data that is routinely updated and also data that is no longer updated but is less than 10 years old (e.g. COVID-19 wider impacts dashboard).
- Scotland: Only datasets that include Scotland are included.
- Population level: It contains data representative of the population it relates to, i.e. small scale research studies are not included.
