There are two days left to make comments to the Health Statistics Users Group on strategic priorities for health and social care statistics and information. All user comments received by the end of January 2011 will feed in to the annual statement of strategic priorities for official statistics on health and social care.

It is particularly helpful if you can include some comments on the information areas that have been identified, using the framework provided, as well as indicating your priorities.  Although there is an opportunity to comment on all the information areas, please note that you are free to comment on just one or two of those information areas, if those are the only ones of particular concern to you.

Alternatively, if you just wish to endorse, query, or add some further detail, to the comments that were made at the workshop, then this is also helpful.

Accessing the workshop outputs and making comments. You can see the output from the workshop on the HSUG web site by following the link to emerging strategic priorities on health and social care statistics. You can also go directly to the report of the workshop on the RSS website or go directly to the user survey.

The last fieldwork for the Citizenship Survey will be March 31st 2011. The Citizenship Survey has been used since 2001 to understand the attitudes and diversity of neighbourhoods. It has been a face to face household survey carried out by the Department for Communities and Local Government covering a representative core sample of almost 10,000 adults in England and Wales each year, plus a minority ethnic boost sample of 5,000 and a Muslim boost sample of 1,200.

The press release announcing the closure states that the survey is  ‘complex and expensive’ and refers to the ‘current drive to deliver cost savings across government and to reduce the fiscal deficit’. A report of the consultation during November 2010 is promised. There is no further attempt to justify cancelling a survey which has been used to inform a wide range of social policies, and without which there will be no regular monitoring of attitudes and behaviour in local neighbourhoods.

The December 2010 (Vol 7, no. 4) of Significance Magazine (a joint publication of the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society) has an interview with Bob Groves by Julian Champkin on the US Census on page 174-175.

(Supplied by David Swanson)

The December 2010 (Vol 7, no. 4) of Significance Magazine (a joint publication of the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society) has a piece by Jack Miles on the reduced 2011 census of the UK (as well as comments about reduced statistics in the UK) on pp. 73-74.

(Supplied by David Swanson)

The December 2010 (Vol 7, no. 4) of Significance Magazine (a joint publication of the American Statistical Association and the Royal Statistical Society) has a piece by Jon Baskerville on the reduced 2011 census of Canada (as well as comments about reduced statistics in the UK) on page 172.

The piece ends with the observation, “…if Canada finds a compulsory census incompatible with the freedom of its citizens, will the world have to follow??”

(Supplied by David Swanson)