NHS Digital has been directed by NHS England to establish and operate a system for the collection and analysis of ambulance data from three ambulance services in England which have agreed to participate in a pilot collection to test the proposed national Ambulance Data Set.

Data is required for the following activity:

• 111/999 emergency operations
  • data from Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems
• ambulance dispatch
  • data from Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems.

The pilot will assess whether the  proposed Ambulance Data Set can be used to enable ambulance services to identify variation and best practice to advance both clinical and operational delivery at a local and national level and improve patient care through secondary use analysis (i.e. not for the direct care of the patient).

21 December 2020: Update: A revised Data Provision Notice (version 1.1) has been published to allow for the extension of the CAD pilot by one month until February 2021.

The initial pilot participants are:

• North West Ambulance Service
• West Midlands Ambulance Service 
• Yorkshire Ambulance Service.

The Ambulance Data Set is to be piloted during two periods; with CAD data being flowed to NHS Digital from November 2020 to February 2021 and EPR data scheduled from June 2021.