Public awareness about care.data

NHS England and the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) have set out the next steps to raise public awareness about care.data, a programme which will use information to improve the safety and care of patients.
 
NHS England, together with the HSCIC, announced that throughout January, all 22 million households in England will receive a leaflet explaining how the new system will work and the benefits it will bring. 

The leaflet drop is the next stage of NHS England’s public awareness plan and follows wide consultation with a range of stakeholders including GPs and patient groups. It will cost about eight pence per household, or around £1 million in total, and will clearly set out how peoples’ information will be used and their right to object if they have concerns.  
 
The NHS treats about one million people every 36 hours, collecting a vast amount of information about how patients have been treated and what their outcomes have been. At the moment, this information is held separately across the NHS. 
 
For the first time, the care.data programme will link information from different NHS providers to give healthcare commissioners a more complete picture of how safe local services are, and how well they treat and care for patients across community, GP and hospital settings. 
 
The information can also be used by NHS organisations to plan and design services better, using the best available evidence of which treatments and services have the greatest impact on improving patients’ health.
 
The HSCIC will extract data routinely from all GP practices as well as hospitals. The data will be brought together in using automated systems in the secure environment of the HSCIC. After being linked together, the information is made available in a form that is stripped of information that could identify patients.

For further information visit www.england.nhs.uk/2013/10/16/care-data and www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/tsd/care-data.