I am trying to get a better understanding of the PCCF/PCCF+ products in order to assist its use by health researchers at Dalhousie. I will use an example to illustrate my questions: A researcher is working with patient data for the time period (year) 2008 to 2011 including postal codes. He would like to use the PCCF/PCCF+ product to better identified each patient’s locality. My questions are:
E.g. 1. Census 2006 has multiple PCCF+ version 5 releases.
| Release | Including Postal Codes through |
|---|---|
| c | Mar 2008 |
| d | Sep 2008 |
| e | Mar 2009 |
| f | Jul 2009 |
| g | Dec 2009 |
| h | Oct 2010 |
| j | May 2011 |
| k | May 2011 |
Should he be using multiple releases of the PCCF+ to correspond with the patient year data? That is PCCF+ 5d for patient data in year 2008, PCCF+ 5g, PCCF+ 5h for patient data in year 2009, PCCF+ 5k for patient data in year 2009? Or can he just use PCCF+ 5k to identity patient locality info for the full 4 years patient data?
E.g. 2. If the patient data only came with FSA, is/are there any advantage(s) in using PCCF+ over PCCF? If not, given that there are multiple PCCF releases (see below), should he be matching up the PCCF releases with the patient year data? Can he just use the latest PCCF release to allocate patient locality info for the full 4 years patient data?
E.g. 1. Census 2006 has multiple PCCF+ version 5 releases.
| Release | Including Postal Codes through |
|---|---|
| Pccf_sep2008 | Sep 2008 |
| Pccf_dec2009 | Dec 2009 |
| Pccf_oct2010 | Oct 2010 |
| Pccf_may2011 | May 2011 |
Answer
Thank you for the question. We have received the following response from Subject Matter:
“With regards to your client’s situation, I would suggest using the PCCF+ over the PCCF because the PCCF+ provides correspondence to historical dissemination/enumeration areas (back to 1981) and it also processes partial postal codes, such as FSAs (although the geocoding is less precise than full 6-digit postal code).
In general, we recommend always using the latest letter version of a PCCF+ census release because they are the cleanest versions of the product. For example, if your client chose to use the PCCF+ based to the 2006 Census then he would use version 5K. Having said that, I would recommend that he uses the most recent version of the product, PCCF+ 6D (based to the 2011 Census geography), because it will assign both the 2011 and 2006 DAs to the patient record and it also includes improvements that are not part of version 5.
FYI, I have attached a document which provides some guidance on when to use the PCCF+ over the PCCF, along with a more detailed overview presentation."
