Linking the Nursing and Residential Care Facility Survey to tax and census data: A new data resource for health workforce research

Calls for comprehensive data collection on the health workforce and long-term care sector have been voiced by policy makers, researchers, and public health experts following the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing health care worker shortages. This paper introduces a novel linked data resource that fills these critical data gaps and establishes a foundation for evidence-informed policy making and workforce planning to strengthen the nursing and residential care system in Canada. This data resource integrates the Nursing and Residential Care Facility Survey, the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamic Database, and the 2021 Census of Population. The structure, coverage, and content of each component file are described, and the deterministic linkage methodology, response rate, and linkage rates are reported. Through an examination of the long-term care workforce across Canadian provinces, this work demonstrates the analytical potential of the integrated data resource for studying staffing patterns, employment characteristics, and economic outcomes. Strengths of this integrated dataset include its near-national scope, inclusion of administrative earnings data, and capacity to support equity-focused research, and limitations include restricted generalizability because of data gaps in certain jurisdictions. Overall, this linked data resource represents a significant advancement of the residential care data infrastructure, providing essential insights into the Canadian health workforce, including personal support workers, nurses, and other health care providers. By bringing together facility-level characteristics, employment and earning records, and detailed sociodemographic information on workers, in-depth analyses of the care economy across provinces can be conducted to improve Canada's health system, workforce, and patient care.