Intelligence to support planning

The Community Health Services Restoration SitRep monthly data collection started on 17 November 2020 to capture the extent to which key services, such as community paediatric paediatric services, have resumed following the initial pause during the first wave of the pandemic. This will enable NHS England to understand the resilience of these services and to  identify specific issues or challenges that are emerging as a result of the second wave of COVID-19 and wider winter pressures.

The weekly 111 First SitRep started on 7 December 2020 to monitor the impact of NHS England’s 111 First programme by looking at changes to flows of patients through the wider Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) system and whether using 111 as the default triage mechanism for UEC patients results in more efficient use of NHS resources.

The Long COVID Assessment Clinics Sitrep collection started on 14 December 2020 on behalf of NHS England to capture data on patient volumes, activities undertaken when assessing Long COVID-19 patients, and patient demographics. This information will enable planning for these clinics and the onward referral pathways. Demographic data will be used to ensure patients from BAME backgrounds, known to be disproportionately affected by COVID-19, are receiving the appropriate care.

Pilot collection of secondary care medicines from the 2 largest suppliers, WellSky and Cerner, continues and is being used to inform the specification for a secondary caremedicine s data set at patient level.

Collection of medicines data from all WellSky trusts (24 trust) commenced on 30 November, flowing historical data (back to January 2019) and implementing a daily flow.

Collection of data from the first Cerner pilot site has been challenging so an additional trust has been engaged to provide sufficient data for analysis and allow standardisation of Cerner data, ensuring comparability (such as dm+d).

This data collection was accelerated to support the COVID-19 response by enabling a better understanding of the role of medicines used in treatment of COVID-19 patients in secondary care (dexamethasone for example) and provides an additional dataset for research.