Due to increasing demand for emergency care, we need to better understand how and why people attend Emergency Departments (ED).
In December 2014 the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Department of Health, NHS England, NHS Digital (previously the Health and Social Care Information Centre), Public Health England, NHS Improvement (previously Monitor), NHS Providers and other parties came together to deliver a collaborative project to develop and implement a new data set for the capture of emergency department activity information across England; the Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS).
ECDS is particularly important in understanding how and why people access urgent and emergency care. To help improve our planning to reduce pressure in the system, the aim is to:
- improve patient care through better and more consistent information;
- allow better planning of healthcare services; and
- improve communication between health professionals
ECDS is better equipped to keep pace with the increasing complexity of delivering emergency care than its predecessor. This means that the improved quality of data collected in emergency departments provides better support to healthcare planning and better informed decision making on improvements to services. This improved data helps the understanding of
- the complexity and acuity of attending patients;
- the causes of rising demand
- the value added by emergency departments
ECDS also allows
- the capture of better diagnostic data to ensure an enhanced understanding of need, activity and outcomes;
- consistent monitoring of data across local and national initiatives
- support for injury surveillance, such that it will be possible to identify patterns that may be amenable to targeted interventions and improved public health
Which in turn informs more effective and efficient resource management.
ECDS was approved as an Information Standard on the 19 April 2017 and was subsequently updated on 07 November 2018.
Following publication of the ECDS as a Standard, the project has now transitioned to business as usual and is managed by NHS England and Improvement.
Every acute trust in England has deployed ECDS, however there are residual issues around data quality, frequency and timeliness of data submission. This impacts on the ability to fully utilise the data set to its full potential and to replace the majority of the daily Sitrep and all the monthly aggregate data collection.