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Creating a new NHS England: NHS England and NHS Digital merged on 1 February 2023. More about the merger.

Metadata dashboard

This dashboard provides metadata on publicly available fields for available data sets.

Page contents

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These pages are in public beta. You can complete this short questionnaire to provide feedback. 

The Metadata dashboard will display the following:

  • Data Set Name - the name of the data set as displayed in DARS online
  • Field Name <display name> – name of the field as displayed in DARS online
  • Database Field name – name of the field as output to the customer
  • Description – description of the data the field contains
  • Field Type – data type of the specific field can contain: date, string, integer (whole number) & number (decimal number)
  • Identifiable field – the field contains identifiable data
  • Field Start Date – the date of the earliest record available in the specific field
  • Field End Date - the date of the final record in a specific field, if a field has stopped flowing
Accessibility of this dashboard

This tool is in Microsoft PowerBI which does not fully support all accessibility needs. If you need further assistance, please contact us for help.


The following data sets do not contain metadata at the field level and have been excluded from the BETA version of the dashboard:

  • Mental Health of Children and Young People (MHCYP) survey
  • Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS)

The following datasets have been structured into pre-built packages therefore field selection will not be available to customers and as such will not display in this BETA version of the dashboard. Please contact data applications team ([email protected]) for an updated list of available fields per package:

  • Community Services Data Set (CSDS)
  • COVID-19 Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (ePMA) in Secondary Care
  • Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS)
  • Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS)
  • Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT)
  • Un-curated Low Latency Hospital Data Sets

Last edited: 30 January 2023 11:22 am