Acute oncology dashboard

The Acute Oncology Service (AOS) supports cancer patients who attend hospital and are unwell with a complication of their cancer, side effects of their cancer treatment or have a new diagnosis of cancer.

The data in this report is focussed on patients with an emergency attendance or admitted patients (where the patient was in a bed for one or more nights).

The purpose of these items is to capture the unplanned care cancer patients receive in an Acute care environment.  These data are only for collection by those Hospitals with an Acute Oncology Service (AOS) in place. 

For COSD v9 AO data the assessment will have been ‘face to face’ with the patient (rather than by phone)* and carried out by Nursing or Medical staff who are contracted members of the local AOS or trained by the AOS to provide appropriate levels of care and decision making on behalf of the AOS.  These data are generally collected by the AOS as part of their day to day activity and are used in the compilation of their Quality Surveillance returns for Acute Oncology, Neutropenic Sepsis, CUP and MSCC activity and targets.

These data have been chosen for collection within COSD, rather than the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) dataset, due to the points in the pathway not always being directly linked to a systemic anti-therapy treatment.

Acknowledgement

This work uses data that has been provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support. The data is collated, maintained and quality assured by the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS), which is part of NHS England (NHSE).

The Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD) supports national cancer registration and associated analysis (at local, regional, national, and international level) in addition to other national cancer audit programmes. All NHS providers of cancer services in England have been required to provide a monthly return using this data set for all cancer diagnoses since January 2013.

These reports have been designed to support trust data collection teams, facilitate data improvement work and to enable clinicians and management boards to understand their COSD conformance and the quality of their submissions..

Find out more about the COSD dataset.

This report shares the methodology derived from an aggregated COSD dataset. The dataset includes counts in specific COSD metrics aggregated by month of diagnosis, provider and broad cancer groups based on ICD10. The dataset is refreshed monthly (beginning of third week) to include all submissions made by providers with dates of diagnosis in the current and previous year.

This dashboard provides access to operational and clinical data produced by NDRS. The data is derived from sensitive patient level information and is shared to support data quality improvement, service planning, and performance monitoring within health and care organisations.

While the data is de-personalised, small numbers or rare conditions may increase the risk of re-identification. Users must therefore take care when interpreting and sharing outputs.

By accessing this dashboard, users are expected to act in accordance with NHS information governance principles, the Caldicott Principles, and applicable data protection legislation, including the Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR.

Users must ensure that:

• data is used only for legitimate health and care purposes
• data is not used to identify individuals, either directly or indirectly
• data is not shared, reproduced, or used outside authorised environments or without a clear business need
• any onward sharing is carefully considered, balancing the risk of disclosure against the intended benefit, and only shared with appropriate organisations or individuals
• outputs are interpreted appropriately, taking account of limitations in completeness, timeliness, and accuracy
• published or shared data relates only to their own organisation or is benchmarked against England-level data
• any published outputs meet anonymisation standards
• advice is sought from local Information Governance teams or a Caldicott Guardian where there is any uncertainty or risk

Permission must be sought in advance of any publication that includes Welsh and/or Scottish data from:

• email Public Health Wales
• email Public Health Scotland

When publishing data please ensure to follow the guidance for staff and stakeholders about how and when to acknowledge the use of NDRS data.

If you have any concerns about data use, interpretation, or disclosure risk, please email the NDRS team at nhsdigital.ndrsdatahub@nhs.net 

If you have any feedback or questions about the data in these Dashboards, please submit your enquiry via the contact us form on the UK Acute Oncology Society website. 

Please do not include sensitive or patient identifiable information.