Category Archives: data

Analysing the NHS organ donor register

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Data journalism is all about pure facts and figures but you need a vested emotional interest in the information in order to bring it alive. For various reasons, the donor register is something I’ve been curious about for a while. Not so much its existence per se, but rather the profile of who is – and who isn’t – on it.

I’m just about to embark on a data project based on the register and will be doing a series of posts. I thought I’d kick off this entry by talking a little about why I chose this topic and what I hope to gain.

Continue reading →

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NHS trust performance and patient ratings – data

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NHS Local have launched a service to search for NHS trust ratings and performance data. Sadly there doesn’t appear to be a link to the full data, so we’ll work on scraping it if someone else doesn’t get there first.

The email about the service promises more data to come:

“NHS local plans to expand the service by creating star-ratings on the performance of  GPs.  We also intend to offer more detail about the hospital trusts, showing data and patient satisfaction about specific treatments, such as knee or hip operations. The feedback from patients is not yet being shown in realtime, but we are working towards that.”

And there’s a contact area to give feedback – let them know we want the raw data!

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Public health spending now and to come – data and documents

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NHS public health spending per head 2010-11 mapped to local authorities by local authority index of deprivation

Data visualised by David Buck: NHS public health spending per head 2010-11 mapped to local authorities by local authority index of deprivation

Next year a huge chunk of money for health improvement services will be taken from local NHS bodies (PCTs – primary care trusts) and given to local government (councils) instead.

As a result, as David Buck explains, the Department of Health has had to quickly find out – for the first time – how much money is being spent on public health, so that it knows how much it needs to reallocate – and the result is particularly useful if you’re interested in previous spending or how it might change under the new system. Continue reading →

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Data: GP patient lists – now with QOF data

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Following Sunday’s post on GP patient list data and possible avenues to explore, Carl Plant has added Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF) data, which provides extra context on the prevalence of particular conditions in each surgery’s population, as well as other data such as age distribution. You can find the combined Google spreadsheet here, or the same data in Fusion Tables here.

Let us know if you do anything with it – or have questions.

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Want to investigate GP patient lists?

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UPDATE (Feb 24 2012): You can find GP surgery-level data on demographics and other contextual information on the NHS IC Indicators site.

We’ve been following developments related to GP patient lists and proposals to abolish GP boundaries for a while, and this week saw some particularly interesting developments .

Pule reported that Department of Health advisory body Primary Care Commissioning had issued guidance on “brutal new GP list cleansing targets next year”:

“[T]he guidance lists successful list-cleansing schemes and gives examples of targeted campaigns in South Gloucestershire, South West Essex and Berkshire West which resulted in the removal of 24,000 ghost patients.

“They include sending verification letters to all patients aged over 90 to 100 years and annually to all immigrants. If they do not respond, then these patients will be given a FP69 flag to inform their GP the patient will be removed from their list.

“They also say anyone who is out of the country for three months or more should be automatically struck off GP lists and that multi-occupancy dwellings should be targeted.”

Meanwhile Eastlondonlines reported on 2 of the 6 places chosen to pilot abolishing GP boundaries for a year from the beginning of April. These are: Continue reading →

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Data: investigating “Never events” (easily avoidable medical mistakes)

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Here’s an example of where a little knowledge of jargon can give you a useful lead in finding data.

The Eastbourne Herald report on an FOI-led investigation they have done into “easily avoidable mistakes, known in the health service as Never Events”:

“BUNGLING NHS staff removed incorrect teeth and carried out a biopsy on the wrong part of a patient’s body as part of a catalogue of errors in 2010 and 2011.

“…the Herald FOI found there were seven such incidents between October 2010 and November 2011.

“They included wrong hip surgery, a piece of medical equipment known as a protoscope left inside a patient’s body and a failure to remove a throat pack following dental surgery. There was also a biopsy on the wrong part of someone’s body and a guidewire left in a patient after staff fitted a central venus pressure line.”

A quick advanced search for “Never events” filetype:xls site:nhs.uk brings up a number of spreadsheets with data you can access without an FOI.

Can you do anything with it?

Tip: try changing site:nhs.uk to your local NHS websites, or try changing filetype:xls to filetype:pdf for reports.

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Welsh Government to publish data on patients’ funding requests (and tips)

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WalesOnline reports on confirmation by the Welsh Government that it is to publish data on patients’ requests for funding for drugs, following FOI requests that revealed “large disparities in the number of requests for funding for cancer drugs not approved by the All-Wales Medicines Strategy Group (AWMSG) or the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice).

“Some health boards refused two-thirds of these funding requests, while others declined just 15%.”

The data is to be published on a health board basis, rather than at a national level. Continue reading →

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Referral to Treatment times (RTT) per PCT March to August 2011

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Details taken from the Department of Health website:

The Referral To Treatment (RTT) data collections monitor the length of time from referral through to treatment.

Monthly RTT data has been published since March 2007. Initially data was only published for patients whose RTT pathways ended in admission for treatment. Since August 2007, monthly data has also been published for non-admitted patients (those whose RTT pathways ended for reasons other than admission for treatment) and for incomplete pathways (those still active at the end of the reporting month). Adjusted admitted RTT data has been published since March 2008 – this data set reports admitted patient RTT times allowing for clock pauses, in line with published RTT clock rules.

This map and datatable show the RTT stats and how PCT’s did seeing patients within the 18 week target. The yellow icons in the map indicate where a Trust has seen below 90% of patients in under 18 weeks.

Here’s a link to a datatable where you can query the data. What can you discover by looking at this data? Would you like more RTT data or have the same data in different formats?

You can request data on any health topic and I can check if it’s available and help to make the data presentable.

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