Registered Blind and Partially Sighted People, England 2022-23

This data quality report aims to provide users with an evidence-based assessment of the quality of the 2022-23 statistical output from the SSDA902 return, reporting against the nine European Statistical System (ESS) quality dimensions. For more specific information about the quality of the latest year’s data see the Data Quality Summary file.

This report also provides information on the known data quality issues within the 2022-23 Registered Blind and Partially Sighted People report and accompanying data, in order to allow the reader and users of the data to understand any limitations of the data.

SSDA902 data, collected in 2022-23 through the Short and Long Term (SALT) return, relates to the registers of blind and partially sighted people maintained by councils with social services responsibilities. It collects data on the numbers of people on each register at the end of the reporting year and the number of new registrations during the reporting year. Data are also requested on the number of registered blind and partially sighted persons who have an additional disability.

The guidance and a copy of the tables for the current collection are available on the social care collection materials webpage.

The degree to which the statistical product meets user needs in both coverage and content

Aggregate data for all people registered blind and partially sighted is mandated to be collected from 152 local authorities in 2022-23.

The data are used by central government to monitor the impact of social care policy and by local government to assess their performance in relation to their peers. This is also available for use by researchers looking at local authority performance, the RNIB to understand the population of people they intend to support, and by services users and the public to hold local authorities and government to account.

The proximity between an estimate and the unknown true value

The accuracy of the data is the responsibility of the local authorities who submit the data to NHS England. The SSDA902 return is an aggregate collection and as NHS England does not have access to the individual records behind the aggregate counts, we are reliant on local authorities to assess their own data quality.

The submission and validation process for each collection is carried out as follows:

1. The local authority collates the data for submission in the relevant collection form. This form includes inbuilt validations to allow local authorities to check their data for common issues prior to submission
2. Local authority submits data by the mandated deadline
3. All local authorities who met the deadline receive a data quality report covering critical validations and also providing some derived totals allowing local authorities to confirm their data is correct
4. NHS England reviews the quality of all files submitted and may provide additional support to local authorities with significant data quality issues
5. Local authorities are able to resubmit data to amend any identified quality issues
6. Final deadline for submission
7. Following the final deadline NHS England will carry out analysis of the quality of final deadline. Although local authorities cannot resubmit data after this point, they may be contacted for additional clarification or context.

The validation checks carried out throughout this process include:

• Checks for missing data items
• Checks against the previous collection

The data submitted was completed to a high degree, with the final returns yielding a very high national completeness score. For those local authorities that made a submission, 99.83% of mandatory cells we completed.

The final validations consisted of looking at the responses to validation checks mentioned above to see if there are clear instances where data are implausible or local authorities have submitted data not in line with the guidance for the data collection and contacting the local authorities where necessary.

Issues local authorities advised have advised NHS England of include:

• Register data paused during COVID-19 pandemic
• Disability data not being routinely recorded, or only for certain age groups
• Data not available in case management system or from third party data provider
• Manual collection and checking needed to provide data
• Childrens data not recorded on system and disability information is not mandatory
• Deceased clients not being removed from the register
• New case management system and data quality exercise completed
• Data quality issues with the register.

Following the final deadline, South Tyneside discovered an error with the SSDA902 submitted figures. This is an isolated incident within this section of the SALT return. Figures in Table 1, 2 and 3 have all been under reported. Please see the Data Tables and Data Quality Tables for more detail.

People that have a Certificate of Vision Impairment from an ophthalmologist choose whether or not to be included in their local authority’s register of blind or partially sighted people; registration is not automatic. This means that not everybody that has been certified as having vision impairment is recorded on a local authority register. For this reason, the data in this publication cannot be considered as definitive numbers of blind and partially sighted people.

The statistics relating to blind people who have an additional disability may understate the true numbers. This is partly because there is no advantage to a blind person in being registered as having additional disabilities.

Where there was information on additional disabilities for people having multiple disabilities including deaf or hard of hearing, local authorities were advised to count this under the category of deaf or hard of hearing. This could lead to a bias towards deaf or hard of hearing disabilities.

SALT Returns via which the SSDA902 data is collected were submitted by 151 of 152 local authorities. A number reported difficulties in completing the additional disabilities section of the data return.

Due to a serious cyber-attack in 2020, Hackney Council were still unable to submit in 2022-23 data to NHS England.

In order to present England and Regional-level statistics that can be compared to previous years, NHS England have calculated estimates based on adding missing local authority data to 2022-23 regional and national totals.

These can be summarised as:

• adding 2019-20 Hackney SSDA902 data to 2022-23 totals

We previously investigated other options for estimating England level statistics, such as uplifting previous years’ data for the missing local authorities by a factor equal to either the latest national, regional or nearest neighbour percentage increase. As these ranges of estimates are fairly narrow, we therefore chose the option described above and have continued using this to be consistent over time.

The detailed Data Tables and CSV’s display Hackney local authority data as [x], denoting missing data.

Timeliness refers to the time gap between publication and the reference period. Punctuality refers to the gap between planned and actual publication dates

The data relate to the period 2022-23 and therefore the lag from the end of the financial year to publication is eleven months.

This publication has been released in line with the pre-announced publication date and is therefore deemed to be punctual.

Accessibility is the ease with which users are able to access the data, also reflecting the format in which the data are available and the availability of supporting information. Clarity refers to the quality and sufficiency of the metadata, illustrations and accompanying advice

This publication is in HTML, in order to meet the Government Accessibility Standard. Data Tables are available to download from the NHS Digital website in Excel (.xlsx) and comma-separated values (.csv) format to allow the user access to the underlying data.

Data in the commentaries and tables of this report have been rounded to the nearest five. Values of 0,1,2,3 and 4 have been suppressed with [c], for disclosure reasons.

Coherence is the degree to which data that are derived from different sources or methods, but refer to the same topic, are similar

Although not directly comparable, the Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF) includes an indicator for preventable sight loss which draws on data from Certification of Vision Impairment (CVIs); 4.12iv - Preventable sight loss - sight loss certifications. CVI figures map well to registration figures – in 2019-20, the latest data point where both certification and registration data are available, there is a high level of concordance (20,945 registrations in 2019-20 compared with 23,285 certifications; 90.0%).

Comparability is the degree to which data can be compared over time and domain, for example, geographic level

For changes over time, please see previous publications in the Registered Blind and Partially Sighted People series.

As part of the data validation process, local authorities provide feedback on data quality, available in the Data Quality summary.

Trade-offs are the extent to which different aspects of quality are balanced against each other.

For the 2022-23 reporting period, two submission periods were made available for local authorities. This was consistent with the 2019-20 return. Data Quality reports and support were made available to those local authorities who submitted by the first deadline. Local Authorities were able to make updates to their first cut of data during the validation period.

The processes for finding out about users and uses, and their views on the statistical products

User feedback on the format and content of the 2022-23 Registered Blind and Partially Sighted People publication is invited; please send any comments to [email protected]

Information about collection form and guidance can be accessed on the 2022-23 Social Care collection materials page.

The SSDA902 data were collected as part of the SALT return data, and the data collection process used in this publication is subject to assurance by the Data Alliance Partnership Board (DAPB). This is to ensure that data collections do not duplicate other collections, minimise the burden to all parties and have a specific use for the data collected. Further information on DSAS can be found at: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/information-standards/information-standards-and-data-collections-including-extractions

The burden of this collection has been assessed and approved, the burden of any changes to the collection are similarly assessed, to ensure that they do not create undue burden for local authorities.

The procedures and policy used to ensure sound confidentiality, security and transparent practices

All official statistics should comply with all aspects of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. They are awarded National Statistics status following an assessment by the Authority’s regulatory arm. The Authority considers whether the statistics meet the highest standards of Code compliance, including the value they add to public decisions and debate.

It is NHS England’s responsibility to maintain compliance with the standards expected of National Statistics. If we become concerned about whether these statistics are still meeting the appropriate standards, we will discuss any concerns with the Authority promptly. National Statistics status can be removed at any point when the highest standards are not maintained, and reinstated when standards are restored.

SSDA902 data is submitted to NHS England through a secure electronic file transfer system called Strategic Data Collection Service (SDCS). The submitted files are transferred from SDCS and stored on a secure network with restricted access folders.

All publications are subject to a standard disclosure risk assessment prior to issue, which is approved by the Head of Profession for Statistics. Disclosure rules are carried out in line with the NHS Anonymisation standard.

Please see links below for more information about related NHS England policies:

Statistical Governance Policy

Freedom of Information Process

Data Access Request Service

Privacy and data protection

Small Numbers Procedure