Minimum Data Sets (Hansard, 2 July 2002)

§ Mr. Lammy

[holding answer 27 June 2002]: To date. national minimum data sets have been developed for use in the national health service as follows:

Admitted patient care (in-patients and day cases) Elective admission (waiting) lists

Out-patient attendances

Accident and Emergency attendances.

Collection of admitted patient care and outpatient minimum data sets for transmission via the NHS-wide clearing service is mandatory. Currently it is not mandatory for NHS trusts to exchange elective admission list or Accident and Emergency data sets via the clearing service.

Building on work done by the clinical professions, considerable progress is being made in developing data sets to support sharing information along care pathways and the production of comparative clinical information to enable services to monitor quality and clinical performance. This includes developing clinical data sets in the national service framework areas as follows:

Cancer
Mental health
Coronary heart disease
Older people, including single assessment, stroke, falls and dementia, and
Diabetes.

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The cancer data set has been piloted and once it has been revised in the light of the pilots, decisions will be taken on phased implementation in the NHS. Services are already beginning to collect the waiting times component of the data set.

For mental health, a programme is in place to ensure that appropriate services are collecting the mental health minimum data set by 31 March 2003. Further work to develop a comprehensive mental health data set is planned.

And for coronary heart disease, work is in hand to standardise four existing data sets on paediatric cardiac care, acute myocardial infarction, adult surgery and angioplasty to ensure they are consistent and to develop a more comprehensive data set. The paediatric cardiac care and acute myocardial infarction data sets are being collected and used to monitor services. Collection of the adult surgery data started in April 2002 with the aim of having robust national comparative data on the clinical quality of care by 2004.

The older people and diabetes data sets are at an earlier stage of development.

The NHS Information Authority is responsible for the development of national data sets which can then be applied across the NHS in England through their national data set development programme. The data sets are based on national standards which are approved by the independent NHS information standards board.