News
News
Data Quality
The ECFSPR, with its participating countries, is responsible for ensuring that the data is complete, accurate, and up to date.
Measures to ensure data quality
The ECFSPR, with its participating countries, is responsible for ensuring that the data is complete, accurate, and up to date. Several measures are employed by the ECFSPR to optimise data quality. Annual data from the respective centres is either entered directly in the ECFSTracker or a cumulative data file is uploaded to the platform after collecting data from the individual centres. The inbuilt controls and validation rules on this platform prompts the users to verify the entered data prior to its submission. For the national data files, an online checker is available on the ECFSTracker homepage that provides a summary of the general errors to be resolved before file submission. On receiving the data, the ECFSPR statistician performs longitudinal data checks to rectify the errors and then finalises the data for the generation of the country based reports. Once these reports have been approved by the countries, the ECFSPR Highlights report and the Annual report are generated and published on the ECFS homepage.
Onsite data validation programme
Additionally, the Data Quality Onsite Validation visit programme was devised in 2018, to validate data against the source at the centres (according to the SOP 131 - Validation Visit at Source). The ECFSPR visited 35 out of 43 countries from 2018-2024. They include AL, AM, AT, BG, CH, CY, CZ, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GE, GR, HR, IE, IL, IS, IT, LT, LU, LV, MD, ME, MK, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SI, SK, TR.
In 2025, our prospective country visits include centres previously not visited for data validation in DK, ES, GR, HU and PL.
The countries with established national registries, are invited to apply for the Data Validation Programme to carry out data checks nationally, in accordance with the SOP 131, and share the outcome of these visits with the ECFSPR on or before 31. March. 2026.