Quality and safety of healthcare (2020.06.23)

• Research type

  Research Database

• IRAS ID

  276190

• Research summary

  Research to identify measures of quality and safety in healthcare

• REC name

  London - South East Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  20/LO/0611

• Date of REC Opinion

  27 May 2020

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion

• Data collection arrangements

  The Dr Foster Unit carries out research into the quality and safety of healthcare in England. We hold de-identified hospital administrative data for patients treated in the NHS in England for research purposes. This includes information on hospital admissions, outpatient appointments, A&E attendance, and critical care. Data are provided to us by NHS Digital. All research data are held on secure servers on the unit’s ‘Private Network’ which is located at an Imperial College manged ‘secure enclave’ at a secure data centre. Only approved and authorised Imperial personnel can access our health data. We are not permitted and never use identifiable data for research, we never share any identifiable data with Dr Foster Intelligence.

  We also separately hold a limited identifiable data set to assist NHS hospitals to help them investigate potential issues around safety and quality of care which includes patients’ NHS Number and Local Hospital Number. No clinical data are held within this identifiable database, and it is kept separate from our research database. We hold these identifiable data for a maximum of three years.

• Research programme

  We use hospital administrative data to examine variations in quality and safety for a range of patient groups and specialties. We publish in peer reviewed journals and our findings are used by both academics and the NHS. As an example, our work on mortality was pivotal in alerting the then Healthcare Commission (HCC) to problems at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. To compare units fairly, these measures often need to be adjusted for differences in patient characteristics such as age, and we will continue our work to take these into account. We also use the data to understand the reasons behind variations in performance, such as the relationship between surgeon experience, use of services, capacity and patient outcomes. We also use the data to alert NHS organisations of potential problems with quality and safety of care and to identify their own clinical records for further investigation. We supply a de-identified set of data to Dr Foster under agreements with NHS Digital. Dr Foster are an independent provider of healthcare intelligence, and use the data in a range of information systems to help clinicians and managers to better understand their performance and safety in the context of others.

• Research database title

  Research to identify measures of quality and safety in healthcare

• Establishment organisation

  Dr Foster Unit, School of Public Health, Imperial College London

• Establishment organisation address

  3 Dorset Rise

  London

  EC4Y 8EN