Children's Surgery Outcome Reporting (CSOR) programme

The Children's Surgery Outcome Reporting (CSOR) programme is a 5-year programme designed to investigate whether it is possible to reduce unwarranted variation in the health and wellbeing of children undergoing early surgery in different hospitals.

Across the UK, there is significant variation in the way children are treated for surgical conditions (conditions which usually, but not always, require an operation). However, at the moment, it is not known which parts of this variation affect how successfully children are treated.

It will only be possible to find this out if reliable information can be collected about how children are currently treated, and this information can be linked to information about their long-term health and wellbeing. The CSOR programme aims to do this.

Additionally, the programme aims to provide a mechanism by which hospitals can compare their own practice to that of others, and elements of good practice can be easily identified and shared. By trying to identify and promote areas of best practice, the CSOR programme will hopefully provide a mechanism for improving the number of children that are successfully treated, as well as improving the experience of children and their carers.

NHS England will soon be identifying children who may be eligible for the CSOR study. We will use the data we hold to identify potentially suitable infants who meet the CSOR study criteria, and provide the names and addresses to the CSOR study team at the University of Oxford so they can reach out to parents with more information about CSOR and invite them to take part. Additional information about the treating hospital and condition will be provided to the study team to ensure that they have the correct information about the child before reaching out to parents.

To manage the invitation process, we will need to keep the list of people who have been invited until 6 months after the research study recruitment is complete.

After this time, all the information stored at NHS England for the purpose of this research programme will be deleted. You can find out more about your choices on how the NHS uses your data for research and planning.

Where consent is not received from parents, all identifiable data held by University of Oxford will be removed within 13 months.

We will use your data to produce summary reports to monitor recruitment into the research study (for example how many people were invited). These reports will not identify you personally.

As an executive non-departmental body reporting to the Department of Health and Social Care most of our processing activity is directed by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. NHS England is Directed under the NHS DigiTrials Recruitment Service Directions 2026 to process data to identify potentially eligible participants to take part in the research study.

Additionally, the Health Research Authority has provided legal support to the CSOR programme Section 251 of the NHS Act 2006 and Regulation 5 of The Health Service (Control of Patient Information) Regulations 2002 which enable the common law duty of confidentiality to be temporarily lifted so that confidential patient information can be disclosed by NHS England to the research study. This support provides the legal basis for suitable participants to be invited to join the research study. This is following advice from the Confidentiality Advisory Group, an advisory body which provides independent expert advice on the use of confidential patient information without consent in England and Wales.

If you have requested that your child’s NHS data is not shared for research and planning purposes (by registering a National Data Opt-out) then you will not receive an invitation for this research study.

To read more about the health and care information NHS England collects, our legal basis for collecting this information and what choices and rights you have, see How we look after your health and care information and our general transparency notice and the related GDPR register entry.

If you do not want your child to be invited by University of Oxford to take part in the CSOR programme, complete our online opt-out form using the button below, or call the team on 01865 617 771. 

The team will complete the form on the NHS England website on your behalf and will not record your details in the CSOR programme database.

Parents can set an opt-out choice on behalf of a child, by proxy, if:

• they are the parent or legal guardian of the patient, who is a child aged 12 or under
• they have a formal legal relationship with the patient, for example they have legal power of attorney or are a court-appointed deputy

NHS England processes and holds the opt-out list on behalf of the CSOR programme. 

If you have previously opted out of sharing your health data for planning and research purposes by submitting a national data opt-out, you do not need to take any action. You will not be invited to take part in this programme by NHS England.