Keith Vaz – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Keith Vaz on 2014-07-16.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 9 July 2014, Official Report, column 310W, on diabetes, what information his Department collects centrally about diabetics.
Jane Ellison
The Health and Social Care information Centre (HSCIC) collects data on diabetes through the National Diabetes Audit Programme, the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF), prescribing and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES).
The National Diabetes Audit (Adults) measures the effectiveness of diabetes healthcare against National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Clinical Guidelines and NICE Quality Standards, in England and Wales.
The National Diabetes Inpatient Audit collects information on the diabetes management that patients receive whilst in hospital and patients’ experience of the inpatient stay.
The National Pregnancy in Diabetes Audit which measures the quality of pre-gestational diabetes care against NICE guideline based criteria and the outcomes of pre-gestational diabetic pregnancy.
The National Diabetes Foot Care Audit collects data which enables all diabetes foot care services to measure their performance against NICE clinical guidelines and peer units, and to monitor adverse outcomes for people with diabetes who develop diabetic foot disease.
The patient experience of diabetes services (pilot collection) measures the diabetes healthcare experiences of people with diabetes in England and Wales.
The QOF collates information across a range of measures on people aged 17 or over who have a diagnosis of diabetes at general practice level.
Data on prescriptions dispensed in the community in England is available for all drugs dispensed in England within the prescription cost analysis dataset which includes drugs used for diabetes. The HSCIC also produce a specific publication – Prescribing for Diabetes in England. The 2005-06 to 2013-14 data was released on 12 August 2014. Prescribing data is also available also available at clinical commissioning group and area team team level within iView. GP practice level prescribing data is also available via the HSCIC website at:
www.hscic.gov.uk/gpprescribingdata
Providers of NHS services in England are required to supply information on activity to the Secondary Uses Services (SUS) database via commissioning datasets. Each month an extract from the SUS database is taken and moved into the HES database which is then made available for analysis. It is possible, therefore, to report activity on admissions to hospital for patients with a diagnosis of diabetes.
Like the majority of data collections for which the HSCIC is responsible, information collected focuses on activity that has taken place rather than where patients have missed appointments.
