Intelligence to support planning

Impact of shielding on clinically vulnerable

NHS Digital supported a National Audit Office (NAO) review of the effectiveness of the Shielding Programme in protecting the clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV).

We developed a methodology to identify care home residents on the Shielded Patients List and linked that information with hospital admission and mortality data sets to assess impact of COVID-19 on care home residents.

We provided analysis to the NAO on 8 December 2020 and the NAO published their report on 10 February 2021 (Protecting and supporting the clinically extremely vulnerable during lockdown - National Audit Office (NAO) Report).

Electronic Prescribing and Administration (EPMA) Data in Secondary Care

NHS Digital made secondary care medicines data available through our Data Access Request Service (DARS) on 24 February 2021 for use in planning and research.

The data is collected daily and covers around 9% of total prescribing activity in secondary care from January 2019 to present, providing a full year of pre-COVID-19 prescribing data as well data for the first year of the pandemic.

Data for a further 6% of prescribing activity will be available from summer 2021. 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 (such as dexamethasone) and provides an additional dataset for research.

Vaccine data

NHS Digital made COVID-19 vaccination events and adverse reactions data products available through DARS on 19 February 2021, further increasing the range of COVID-19 datasets available for planning and research.

Social care

We completed a daily data collection from social care management systems. Around 7% of social care providers participated in the collection of 70,000 data items, including key demographic data and COVID-19 status for both social care receivers and social care providers. While the collection will cease on 31 March 2021, it has provided useful trend analysis for the sector and successfully demonstrated that data can be collected directly from these systems.

NHS Digital is working with the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and partners to ensure lessons learned from this collection are integrated into the strategy for social care data collection.