This release is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Outputs. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
The COPA is a pseudonymised copy of the Census of Population 2022 dataset held internally within the CSO for analysis purposes. It contains Census attribute information for individuals and households of which 95% of records have a PIK which allows them to be linked to pseudonymised administrative data sources to create new analysis.
The Census population figures in this report relate to the de facto population meaning persons who were present in the State on the night of Sunday, 03 April 2022. The de facto population includes persons who do not usually live in Ireland but who were in the State on Census Night. It excludes persons who usually live in Ireland but who were temporarily absent, outside of the State, on Census Night. Persons who were present in the State were enumerated and are reported at the location where they spent Census Night. This may not have been the location where they usually live.
The data in this release is provided to the Central Statistics Office by the PCRS. The PCRS is responsible for reimbursing GPs, Dentists, Pharmacists, Optometrists/Ophthalmologists, and other contractors who provide free or reduced-cost services to the public across a range of primary care schemes. PCRS supports the delivery of primary healthcare by providing reimbursement services to primary care contractors for the provision of health services to members of the public in their own community. Almost all payments for publicly funded healthcare services provided in the community by GPs, community pharmacies, dentists and optometrists/ophthalmologists are made by the PCRS.
Under the General Medical Services (GMS) Scheme, provides access to medical and surgical services for persons for whom acquiring such services would present undue hardship. They may be granted a medical card or GP visit card and receive free general medical services for themselves and their dependants. All GMS claims are processed and paid by the PCRS.
The data in this release includes persons who are eligible for the GMS only. Claims made under other schemes managed by the PCRS are not included in this release. The data used in this release is from 2022.
Department of Social Protection’s (DSP's) database (real-time) from the Business Object Model implementation (BOMi) and Integrated Short-Term Payments System (ISTS) contains information on welfare payments, including state pension, unemployment benefit and child benefit (adults only). Data is supplied monthly. The data used in this release is from 2022.
Data matching was carried out on a person level using unique person identifier keys (PIKs). The main results from the data matching exercise between COPA 2022, PCRS-GMS, and DSP data split by HSE Health Region are presented in the table HHR03 and HHR04. The table HHR03 presents statistics related to PCRS-GMS and COPA 2022 match. While HHR04 shows statistics related to the selected DSP payments and COPA 2022 match. (see the Data chapter of this report).
It is important to note that the percentage of medical cards, GP visit cards and the percentage of people availing of DSP selected payments may be understated, due to the unmatched records that would have been otherwise distributed across the HSE Health Regions. As such, these results should be treated as provisional.
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