NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
Department of Health and Social Care · Ministerial Department
In term In term in the September 2026 edition: the latest version runs to 20 March 2029.
- Reference
- DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S
- Current version
- v6.2
- Term of current version
- 5 June 2026 to 20 March 2029
- Start date
- 10 July 2024
- Data controller
- Sole Data Controller
- Commercial purposes
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Files released to date
- 0
Why the data was released
Objective for processing
The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) requires access to NHS England data for the purpose of data analysis aimed at supporting policy development under the duties of the Secretary of State for Health set out within the National Health Service Act 2006. These duties are set out in the 2006 Act, but relate more generally to the role and purpose of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the role of the Department of Health and Social Care as the relevant Department of State, exercising these executive functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. In general terms, these purposes are to deliver health and care services in the most effective way possible; to deliver the best possible health for the population and to do both of those in a way that makes best use of available resources.
The Department does this by formulating Government policy, and overseeing the role and functions of a range of other national bodies, mostly those established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To make government policy in this area effective, to meet the needs of a population of 50m people and service interactions that run into the hundreds of millions, it is important that policy is nuanced and subtle and takes account of differences in the needs of different demographics – for example establishing Accident and Emergency (A&E) policy in a way that responds to the needs of pregnant women whilst also responding to the needs of 85 year old diabetic men.
It is important that policy formulation is evidence based. DHSC analysts and officials will use data accessed via this agreement to explore and analyse these detailed datasets to provide insights that will inform policy decisions. They will also use the Data and evidence to respond appropriately to emergent challenges and issues, for example analysing in detail the impact on services from any pandemic contagious illnesses; providing actionable evidence and briefing to decision makers.
These duties include, but are not limited to the following elements of the 2006 Act:
1 Secretary of State's duty to promote a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement—
(a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and
(b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.
• 1A Duty as to improvement in quality of services
• 1B Duty as to the NHS Constitution
• 1C Duty as to reducing inequalities
• 1D Duty as to promoting autonomy
• 1E Duty as to research
• 1F Duty as to education and training
• 1G Secretary of State's duty as to reporting on and reviewing treatment of providers
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to protect and improve the health of the population under sections 2A and 2B of the NHS Act 2006 (as inserted by the Health and Social Care Act 2012):
In supporting the Secretary of State (SofS) in the delivery of the above tasks and duties, DHSC will use the data shared under this agreement to undertake
- Benchmarking;
- Provision of support services;
- Production of publications including contributing to national and regional publications;
- Support of the Government in the development and monitoring of policy;
- Early analysis for projects and programmes to support commissioning and policy decisions;
- Commissioning decisions;
- Responding to and answering of parliamentary questions in a timely fashion as part of statutory duties.
- Applying advanced analytical methods to the Data to allow policy formulation to take due account of variation in needs arising from characteristics of patients (demographics, combinations of diagnosis, pattern of interaction with services) and characteristics of health and care interactions in order to fulfil SofS’s responsibilities to deliver health and care services effectively, to deliver the greatest possible benefit to the health of the wider population and do both of these in a way that makes the best possible use of available resources.
The analysis conducted by DHSC is wide ranging and will most often be used for internal DHSC purposes. DHSC analysts do however also provide support across government and to other public sector organisations including No. 10 and Cabinet Office, Treasury, Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, NHS England, UK Health Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, Integrated Care Boards/Trusts and Local Authorities.
Department of Health & Social Care analysts are often required to carry out detailed analysis of data. This serves two broad purposes:
(i) In effect, to operate a focused research, analysis and discovery function: to use the Data to understand the nuance and subtlety of policy formulation and its potential impacts on particular groups of patients or public. This work includes the need to consider associations or correlations between different aspects of healthcare provision, to understand how services and policies relate to each other.
(ii) To respond urgently to requests for briefing; analysing detailed data to provide summary aggregate information that will allow policy decision makers (including Government Ministers) to address emergent challenges or issues and to make informed policy and service management decisions.
The following Data will be accessed as:
Aggregated (Small Numbers Unsuppressed)
Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL)
o Necessary to enable DHSC's analysts to conduct analysis to gain insights about the cancer pathways and cancer waiting times.. The aim is to inform DHSC senior officials and Ministers, and enable evidence-based decision-making relating to efforts to improve cancer waiting times.
Better Care Fund (BCF) –
o Necessary to help the system to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
Health Education England (HEE) Dental Training Posts –
o Necessary to better understand how dental trainees move through the training system, and where they are choosing to study.
Patient initiated follow up (PIFU) –
o Necessary to access counts of episodes discharged or moved to a Patient-Initiated Follow-up (PIFU) pathway, grouped by month and provider, extracted from the Provider Elective Recovery Outpatients Collection (EROC). This is so trusts’ performance can be monitored against NHSE’s target of 5% of outpatient attendances resulting in the patient being moved or discharged to a PIFU pathway. There is currently no published data for PIFU, so access to this dataset is required to monitor trust’s progress in PIFU implementation - one of the key Elective Recovery Outpatient transformations.
Specialist Advice Broken Down by Treatment Function
o Necessary to help policy makers to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs, particularly which treatment functions are performing better than others.
Virtual Wards
o Necessary to inform evidence on Getting It Right the First Time (GIRFT) Virtual Wards deep dives. These will help understand variation in services and allow trusts to understand how they compare with other trusts. This is informing a live policy issue around inconsistency in the delivery of Virtual Wards across trusts. This project involves working with 5 clinicians to use their expertise in this area, which will allow the analytical team to steer delivery and improve consistency of Virtual Ward services.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between August 2021 to the latest available
The following Data will be accessed as record-level pseudonymised
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) and All Age Continuing Care Dataset (AACC)
o Necessary to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for His Majesty's Treasury (HMT). This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option.
o PLDS will allow for further understanding of the duration of care packages and the environments in which the care is delivered. Distributional analysis on the care packages will be carried out, to cost out the different options for CHC so that the health needs of this population can be met, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable the development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
o Expanding datasets to include HES / ECDS to the CHC/AACC work will help understand why costs have been increasing whilst eligibility decreases, and why there is so much variation in cost and eligibility across the country to inform Ministers about potential CHC policy changes.
o Adult Social Care, Ambulance Data Set (ADS) and Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) - Combined) and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) will be linked to AACCDS and PLDS. This will enable linkage of patients between the different health/care settings and thereby understand how these patients interact with systems, conduct value for money assessments and obtain some information about the primary support needs of the CHC population. Standard CHC costs have increased by 70% in Cash Terms between 2017/18 and 2023/24, whilst eligibility has reduced by roughly 20%. Further constraints on Funding for Standard CHC are likely to reduce eligibility further. The likely impact of rationing care is that care needs will be pushed onto different parts of the health and social care system, possibly increasing the overall cost of people’s care and making care packages unsafer. The likely impact of rationing care is that care needs will be pushed onto different parts of the health and social care system, possibly increasing the overall cost of people’s care and making care packages unsafe. Ministers want to understand why the costs have been rising so much, and to explore any available options for reform. Analysis is required to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for HMT. This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option. Currently, there is very little knowledge of whether CHC represents value for money and the effect of the CHC care on Hospitals admissions and ASC pressures. This analysis will allow DHSC to cost out the different options for CHC to help meet the health needs of this population, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
Secondary Uses Service (SUS)
o In line with WLMDS and EPP request, SUS will be used for Policy analysis on Volume and Value of Elective Activity to inform progress on Govt/DHSC priority of reducing the elective waiting list within a fixed financial envelope. This analysis will be used to monitor progress of the elective reform plan and target live policy issues such as type and cost of elective activity. This dataset will allow us to further examine the change in elective activity due to case-mix and existing policy interventions. This will enable future policy interventions to target specific types of activity to help support the main priority of reducing the waiting list. It will also be used to support spending reviews, allowing us to evidence key assumptions underpinning these.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between May 2022 to the latest available
DHSC is the controller as the organisation responsible for ensuring that the Data will only be processed for the purpose described above.
Edge Health Ltd is a processor and will act under the instruction of DHSC to perform the CHC / AACC work described above.
The lawful basis for processing personal data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
The lawful basis for processing special category data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) based on Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject.
DHSC align with the statistical purposes limb of Article 9(2)(j).
Processing activities
No data will flow to NHS England for the purposes of this Data Sharing Agreement (DSA).
NHS England will share data with DHSC via the Unified Data Access Layer (UDAL). UDAL is a data management system within NHS England that enables patient data to be processed and made available for analytical purposes.
UDAL accommodates a series of tools, which enable users to explore patient or aggregate data, to create standardised reports and dashboards, and create statistical models.
NHS England will provide access to the relevant records from the datasets described in this Data Sharing Agreement to DHSC. The Data will contain no direct identifying data items and there will be no requirement and no attempt to reidentify individuals when using the Data. Where the Data is pseudonymised, individuals cannot be reidentified through linkage with other data in the possession of the Recipient. As well as accessing data via UDAL, DHSC will be sent aggregate datasets via the UDAL "Data Share" Service. This entails a data provider (NHS England UDAL) and a data consumer (DHSC’s DAC platform), where the provider (NHS England) is in control of who receives data, when it is updated and how frequently.
The Data will be stored on servers at NHS England (UDAL) and DHSC.
The Data will be accessed by authorised personnel via remote access.
The Controller must confirm and provide evidence upon audit by NHS England that access via any remote device complies with the data security obligations within this DSA and the Data Sharing Framework Contract.
For remote access:
- Remote access will only be from secure locations situated within the territory of use (as further restricted elsewhere within the DSA if so done) stated within this DSA;
- Access controls granting users the minimum level of access required are in place;
- Remote access is only via secure connections (e.g., VPNs or secure protocols) to protect data;
- Multifactor authentication (MFA) is required for remote access;
- Device security, including up-to-date software and operating systems, antivirus software, and enabled firewalls are utilised for the remote access;
- All remote access is undertaken within the scope of the organisation’s DSPT (or other security arrangements as per this DSA) and complies with the organisation’s remote access policy.
The above applies in addition to any condition set out elsewhere within the DSA (e.g. who may carry out processing, and for what purpose).
The Data will not leave the UK at any time.
Access is restricted to employees of DHSC and Edge Health Ltd.
All personnel accessing the Data have been appropriately trained in data protection and confidentiality.
Expected output
The following outputs will be produced for all the requested datasets:
- Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
- Written Reports and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
- Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
- An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data to be published publicly on gov.uk
Linkage of datasets with AACCDS and PLDS will help will produce aggregated statistics around Hospital Admissions and typical care journeys (between LA ASC and CHC). DHSC will produce models indicating value for money of CHC. Additionally, DHSC will produce tables and plots with distributions of primary support conditions for CHC recipients and comparisons with similar distributions for the ASC systems. This will then be used within to ministers on CHC which will include fully costed available reform options
The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
• Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
• Written reports/briefing documents and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
• Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
• An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data is published publicly on gov.uk
• Workshops with DHSC officials, Ministers NHS England and other government departments
Written reports/briefing documents and presentations are produced as and when requested.
Data Dashboards are refreshed in line with the refresh frequency of the data underlying them.
The report on the Discharge Fund is produced annually.
The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.
For virtual wards data, the team expect to produce at least the following outputs – summary tables at trust level for:
• acuity of patients within virtual wards
• length of stay within virtual wards
• occupancy within virtual wards
• level of remote monitoring within virtual wards
With SUS data, national, regional and provider tables on information about elective activity split by type of activity, value of activity, treatment function etc. will be produced. This will also include value of activity, which can be used to monitor overall cost of elective activity, which is important for financial monitoring.
Expected measurable benefits
The use of the data could:
· help the system to better understand the health and care needs of populations.
· lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
· advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs.
· advance understanding of the need for, or effectiveness of, preventative health and care measures for particular populations or conditions such as obesity and diabetes.
· inform planning health services and programmes, for example to improve equity of access, experience and outcomes.
· inform decisions on how to effectively allocate and evaluate funding according to health needs.
· provide a mechanism for checking the quality of care. This could include identifying areas of good practice to learn from, or areas of poorer practice which need to be addressed.
· support knowledge creation or exploratory research (and the innovations and developments that might result from that exploratory work).
Patients will benefit from:
• Better evidence-based policy making
• Better outcomes from fewer patients having delayed discharges, meaning more capacity for new patients and better outcomes for patients with less delay.
• Inform Ministerial decision-making relating to efforts to cut cancer waiting times.
• Lead to the identification or improvement of interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience relating to cancer.
• Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs relating to cancer.
• To the extent the analysis helps to reduce waiting times for cancer treatment, this would be expected to help improve health outcomes for some patients. If the analysis identifies potential productivity improvements, this could allow more resources to be used for cancer or other patients, allowing improvements in health outcomes for cancer or other patients.
• The findings will enable senior stakeholders, including Ministers, to understand where students are currently training, and where there may be particular need. This will aid future decision making about improving access to training, fulfilling strategic workforce aims, and ultimately creating more equitable access to dental treatments for the general public.
The data is used to inform and monitor policy decisions, better understanding of the data will help inform colleagues and ministers to make effective decisions.
Specifically, for each of the datasets requested:
CANPTL
• By helping to inform Ministerial and NHS England decision-making related to policies to reduce cancer waiting times.
BCF
• The outputs will allow DHSC to understand how the £1 billion Discharge Fund is being spent and whether it is being used effectively. This will enable better oversight of the fund, enabling it to be better targeted and used more effectively to reduce delayed discharges.
HEE Dental
• Understanding where current training places are allows us to understand the current system, and where there is capacity. This data, used alongside other datasets, will allow us to paint a picture for decision makers on how training place availability, and take-up, is impacting dental access issues that we see across the country.
PIFU and OP Transformation
- Through better understanding of data, to help inform colleagues and ministers to make effective decisions.
Virtual Wards
• Reduced variation across services as trusts learn best practice, which is expected to lead to better outcomes for patients.
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) and and All Age Continuing Care Dataset
• The current Standard CHC system in unsustainable, given the recent increase in costs, reduced eligibility and the current economic position. DHSC need to understand the primary support reasons / conditions of the population, how CHC eligibility affects Hospital admissions and movement between the LA ASC and CHC system, to enable us to effectively map out costed reform options to ensure best outcomes for patients, that is financially sustainable. This will ensure that people are receiving the right level of care and allow us to develop clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future. Furthermore, understanding how CHC and ASC systems interact will support in policy developments that improves patient experience in their CHC and ASC journeys, and reduces conflict between LAs and ICBs. Finally, this analysis will help inform the Casey Commission into Social Care.
SUS
• Monitoring and progress of key policy interventions for elective waiting list. This analysis will inform live policy decisions on further interventions needed to reduce the waiting list from over 7 million to under 4 million - the level required to meet the Govt priority aim that 92% of people will be seen within 18 weeks. This is expected to improve patient experience with the NHS given the length of waiting times. Reducing the elective waiting list will also have indirect positive health and labour market impacts, such as supporting the Govt's key agenda of reducing economic inactivity.
Benefits reported so far
The” Specialist advice broken down by treatment” dataset has been used in some regular reporting outputs which have now been automated. These regularly feed into policy discussions and provide them with key analysis informing on variation across providers, ICBs and treatment functions and more technical work analysing the impact of specialist advice on elective demand which it was set up to do. This work has been significant, feeding into elective modelling ahead of the spending review which has informed a better value for money bid.
Datasets on the current version
Legal basis for provision: Health and Social Care Act 2012 – s261(2)(a); Health and Social Care Act 2012 – s261(7)
| Dataset | Type of data | Sensitivity | Frequency | Confidential data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adult Social Care - UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | System Access | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL) | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Emergency Care and Ambulance Data Sets combined - UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | System Access | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) - UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | System Access | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| HEE Dental Training Posts | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| HES - UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | System Access | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU) | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Secondary Uses Service - UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Non-Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| UDAL_All Age Continuing Care | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
| Virtual Wards - UDAL | Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant | Sensitive | One-Off | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
Files released
Files released counts only files released externally by DARS. Access granted in NHS England's own systems, such as its Secure Data Environment, is not included.
No files recorded as released under this agreement.
Version history
The register lists each renewal of this agreement as a separate row. This site has 7 versions.
DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v6.2 5 June 2026 to 20 March 2029
- Title
- NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
- Commercial
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Datasets
- 13
- Files released
- 0
Datasets: Adult Social Care - UDAL; Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund; Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL); Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL; Emergency Care and Ambulance Data Sets combined - UDAL; Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) - UDAL; HEE Dental Training Posts; HES - UDAL; Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU); Secondary Uses Service - UDAL; Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL; UDAL_All Age Continuing Care; Virtual Wards - UDAL
What changed from DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v5.3
Text removed is struck through; text added is underlined. Unchanged paragraphs are summarised rather than repeated.
| Field | Was | Became |
|---|---|---|
| Start date | 2026-06-05 |
Datasets: + Adult Social Care - UDAL; + Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) - UDAL; + Emergency Care and Ambulance Data Sets combined - UDAL
Objective for processing
[51 paragraphs unchanged] o Adult Social Care, Ambulance Data Set (ADS) and Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) - Combined) and Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) will be linked to AACCDS and PLDS. This will enable linkage of patients between the different health/care settings and thereby understand how these patients interact with systems, conduct value for money assessments and obtain some information about the primary support needs of the CHC population. Standard CHC costs have increased by 70% in Cash Terms between 2017/18 and 2023/24, whilst eligibility has reduced by roughly 20%. Further constraints on Funding for Standard CHC are likely to reduce eligibility further. The likely impact of rationing care is that care needs will be pushed onto different parts of the health and social care system, possibly increasing the overall cost of people’s care and making care packages unsafer. The likely impact of rationing care is that care needs will be pushed onto different parts of the health and social care system, possibly increasing the overall cost of people’s care and making care packages unsafe. Ministers want to understand why the costs have been rising so much, and to explore any available options for reform. Analysis is required to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for HMT. This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option. Currently, there is very little knowledge of whether CHC represents value for money and the effect of the CHC care on Hospitals admissions and ASC pressures. This analysis will allow DHSC to cost out the different options for CHC to help meet the health needs of this population, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future. [11 paragraphs unchanged]
Expected output
[5 paragraphs unchanged] Linkage of datasets with AACCDS and PLDS will help will produce aggregated statistics around Hospital Admissions and typical care journeys (between LA ASC and CHC). DHSC will produce models indicating value for money of CHC. Additionally, DHSC will produce tables and plots with distributions of primary support conditions for CHC recipients and comparisons with similar distributions for the ASC systems. This will then be used within to ministers on CHC which will include fully costed available reform options [16 paragraphs unchanged]
Expected measurable benefits
[30 paragraphs unchanged]
• The current Standard CHC system in unsustainable, given the recent increase in costs, reduced eligibility and the current economic position.
So
DHSC need to
understand the primary support reasons / conditions of the population, how CHC eligibility affects Hospital admissions and movement between the LA ASC and CHC system, to enable us to effectively
map out costed reform options to ensure best outcomes for patients, that
[20 words unchanged]
clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future. Furthermore,
understanding how CHC and ASC systems interact will support in policy developments that improves patient experience in their CHC and ASC journeys, and reduces conflict between LAs and ICBs. Finally,
this analysis will help inform the Casey Commission into Social Care.
[2 paragraphs unchanged]
Unchanged: Processing activities, Benefits reported.
DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v5.3 23 April 2026 to 20 March 2029
- Title
- NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
- Commercial
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Datasets
- 10
- Files released
- 0
Datasets: Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund; Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL); Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL; HEE Dental Training Posts; HES - UDAL; Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU); Secondary Uses Service - UDAL; Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL; UDAL_All Age Continuing Care; Virtual Wards - UDAL
What changed from DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v4.5
Text removed is struck through; text added is underlined. Unchanged paragraphs are summarised rather than repeated.
| Field | Was | Became |
|---|---|---|
| Start date | 2026-04-23 | |
| End date | 2029-03-20 |
Datasets: + HES - UDAL
Objective for processing
[47 paragraphs unchanged] Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) and All Age Continuing Care Dataset (AACC) [2 paragraphs unchanged] o Expanding datasets to include HES / ECDS to the CHC/AACC work will help understand why costs have been increasing whilst eligibility decreases, and why there is so much variation in cost and eligibility across the country to inform Ministers about potential CHC policy changes. [5 paragraphs unchanged] Edge Health Ltd is a processor and will act under the instruction of DHSC to perform the CHC / AACC work described above. [5 paragraphs unchanged]
Processing activities
[16 paragraphs unchanged]
Access is restricted to employees of
DHSC.
DHSC and Edge Health Ltd.
[1 paragraph unchanged]
Unchanged: Expected output, Expected measurable benefits, Benefits reported.
Objective for processing
The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) requires access to NHS England data for the purpose of data analysis aimed at supporting policy development under the duties of the Secretary of State for Health set out within the National Health Service Act 2006. These duties are set out in the 2006 Act, but relate more generally to the role and purpose of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the role of the Department of Health and Social Care as the relevant Department of State, exercising these executive functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. In general terms, these purposes are to deliver health and care services in the most effective way possible; to deliver the best possible health for the population and to do both of those in a way that makes best use of available resources.
The Department does this by formulating Government policy, and overseeing the role and functions of a range of other national bodies, mostly those established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To make government policy in this area effective, to meet the needs of a population of 50m people and service interactions that run into the hundreds of millions, it is important that policy is nuanced and subtle and takes account of differences in the needs of different demographics – for example establishing Accident and Emergency (A&E) policy in a way that responds to the needs of pregnant women whilst also responding to the needs of 85 year old diabetic men.
It is important that policy formulation is evidence based. DHSC analysts and officials will use data accessed via this agreement to explore and analyse these detailed datasets to provide insights that will inform policy decisions. They will also use the Data and evidence to respond appropriately to emergent challenges and issues, for example analysing in detail the impact on services from any pandemic contagious illnesses; providing actionable evidence and briefing to decision makers.
These duties include, but are not limited to the following elements of the 2006 Act:
1 Secretary of State's duty to promote a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement—
(a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and
(b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.
• 1A Duty as to improvement in quality of services
• 1B Duty as to the NHS Constitution
• 1C Duty as to reducing inequalities
• 1D Duty as to promoting autonomy
• 1E Duty as to research
• 1F Duty as to education and training
• 1G Secretary of State's duty as to reporting on and reviewing treatment of providers
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to protect and improve the health of the population under sections 2A and 2B of the NHS Act 2006 (as inserted by the Health and Social Care Act 2012):
In supporting the Secretary of State (SofS) in the delivery of the above tasks and duties, DHSC will use the data shared under this agreement to undertake
- Benchmarking;
- Provision of support services;
- Production of publications including contributing to national and regional publications;
- Support of the Government in the development and monitoring of policy;
- Early analysis for projects and programmes to support commissioning and policy decisions;
- Commissioning decisions;
- Responding to and answering of parliamentary questions in a timely fashion as part of statutory duties.
- Applying advanced analytical methods to the Data to allow policy formulation to take due account of variation in needs arising from characteristics of patients (demographics, combinations of diagnosis, pattern of interaction with services) and characteristics of health and care interactions in order to fulfil SofS’s responsibilities to deliver health and care services effectively, to deliver the greatest possible benefit to the health of the wider population and do both of these in a way that makes the best possible use of available resources.
The analysis conducted by DHSC is wide ranging and will most often be used for internal DHSC purposes. DHSC analysts do however also provide support across government and to other public sector organisations including No. 10 and Cabinet Office, Treasury, Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, NHS England, UK Health Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, Integrated Care Boards/Trusts and Local Authorities.
Department of Health & Social Care analysts are often required to carry out detailed analysis of data. This serves two broad purposes:
(i) In effect, to operate a focused research, analysis and discovery function: to use the Data to understand the nuance and subtlety of policy formulation and its potential impacts on particular groups of patients or public. This work includes the need to consider associations or correlations between different aspects of healthcare provision, to understand how services and policies relate to each other.
(ii) To respond urgently to requests for briefing; analysing detailed data to provide summary aggregate information that will allow policy decision makers (including Government Ministers) to address emergent challenges or issues and to make informed policy and service management decisions.
The following Data will be accessed as:
Aggregated (Small Numbers Unsuppressed)
Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL)
o Necessary to enable DHSC's analysts to conduct analysis to gain insights about the cancer pathways and cancer waiting times.. The aim is to inform DHSC senior officials and Ministers, and enable evidence-based decision-making relating to efforts to improve cancer waiting times.
Better Care Fund (BCF) –
o Necessary to help the system to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
Health Education England (HEE) Dental Training Posts –
o Necessary to better understand how dental trainees move through the training system, and where they are choosing to study.
Patient initiated follow up (PIFU) –
o Necessary to access counts of episodes discharged or moved to a Patient-Initiated Follow-up (PIFU) pathway, grouped by month and provider, extracted from the Provider Elective Recovery Outpatients Collection (EROC). This is so trusts’ performance can be monitored against NHSE’s target of 5% of outpatient attendances resulting in the patient being moved or discharged to a PIFU pathway. There is currently no published data for PIFU, so access to this dataset is required to monitor trust’s progress in PIFU implementation - one of the key Elective Recovery Outpatient transformations.
Specialist Advice Broken Down by Treatment Function
o Necessary to help policy makers to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs, particularly which treatment functions are performing better than others.
Virtual Wards
o Necessary to inform evidence on Getting It Right the First Time (GIRFT) Virtual Wards deep dives. These will help understand variation in services and allow trusts to understand how they compare with other trusts. This is informing a live policy issue around inconsistency in the delivery of Virtual Wards across trusts. This project involves working with 5 clinicians to use their expertise in this area, which will allow the analytical team to steer delivery and improve consistency of Virtual Ward services.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between August 2021 to the latest available
The following Data will be accessed as record-level pseudonymised
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) and All Age Continuing Care Dataset (AACC)
o Necessary to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for His Majesty's Treasury (HMT). This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option.
o PLDS will allow for further understanding of the duration of care packages and the environments in which the care is delivered. Distributional analysis on the care packages will be carried out, to cost out the different options for CHC so that the health needs of this population can be met, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable the development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
o Expanding datasets to include HES / ECDS to the CHC/AACC work will help understand why costs have been increasing whilst eligibility decreases, and why there is so much variation in cost and eligibility across the country to inform Ministers about potential CHC policy changes.
Secondary Uses Service (SUS)
o In line with WLMDS and EPP request, SUS will be used for Policy analysis on Volume and Value of Elective Activity to inform progress on Govt/DHSC priority of reducing the elective waiting list within a fixed financial envelope. This analysis will be used to monitor progress of the elective reform plan and target live policy issues such as type and cost of elective activity. This dataset will allow us to further examine the change in elective activity due to case-mix and existing policy interventions. This will enable future policy interventions to target specific types of activity to help support the main priority of reducing the waiting list. It will also be used to support spending reviews, allowing us to evidence key assumptions underpinning these.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between May 2022 to the latest available
DHSC is the controller as the organisation responsible for ensuring that the Data will only be processed for the purpose described above.
Edge Health Ltd is a processor and will act under the instruction of DHSC to perform the CHC / AACC work described above.
The lawful basis for processing personal data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
The lawful basis for processing special category data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) based on Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject.
DHSC align with the statistical purposes limb of Article 9(2)(j).
Expected output
The following outputs will be produced for all the requested datasets:
- Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
- Written Reports and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
- Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
- An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data to be published publicly on gov.uk
The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
• Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
• Written reports/briefing documents and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
• Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
• An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data is published publicly on gov.uk
• Workshops with DHSC officials, Ministers NHS England and other government departments
Written reports/briefing documents and presentations are produced as and when requested.
Data Dashboards are refreshed in line with the refresh frequency of the data underlying them.
The report on the Discharge Fund is produced annually.
The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.
For virtual wards data, the team expect to produce at least the following outputs – summary tables at trust level for:
• acuity of patients within virtual wards
• length of stay within virtual wards
• occupancy within virtual wards
• level of remote monitoring within virtual wards
With SUS data, national, regional and provider tables on information about elective activity split by type of activity, value of activity, treatment function etc. will be produced. This will also include value of activity, which can be used to monitor overall cost of elective activity, which is important for financial monitoring.
Benefits reported
The” Specialist advice broken down by treatment” dataset has been used in some regular reporting outputs which have now been automated. These regularly feed into policy discussions and provide them with key analysis informing on variation across providers, ICBs and treatment functions and more technical work analysing the impact of specialist advice on elective demand which it was set up to do. This work has been significant, feeding into elective modelling ahead of the spending review which has informed a better value for money bid.
DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v4.5 14 November 2025 to 7 August 2028
- Title
- NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
- Commercial
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Datasets
- 9
- Files released
- 0
Datasets: Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund; Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL); Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL; HEE Dental Training Posts; Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU); Secondary Uses Service - UDAL; Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL; UDAL_All Age Continuing Care; Virtual Wards - UDAL
What changed from DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v3.3
Text removed is struck through; text added is underlined. Unchanged paragraphs are summarised rather than repeated.
| Field | Was | Became |
|---|---|---|
| Start date | 2025-11-14 |
Datasets: + UDAL_All Age Continuing Care
Objective for processing
[47 paragraphs unchanged] Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) and All Age Continuing Care Dataset [12 paragraphs unchanged]
Expected measurable benefits
[29 paragraphs unchanged] Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) and and All Age Continuing Care Dataset [3 paragraphs unchanged]
Unchanged: Processing activities, Expected output, Benefits reported.
Objective for processing
The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) requires access to NHS England data for the purpose of data analysis aimed at supporting policy development under the duties of the Secretary of State for Health set out within the National Health Service Act 2006. These duties are set out in the 2006 Act, but relate more generally to the role and purpose of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the role of the Department of Health and Social Care as the relevant Department of State, exercising these executive functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. In general terms, these purposes are to deliver health and care services in the most effective way possible; to deliver the best possible health for the population and to do both of those in a way that makes best use of available resources.
The Department does this by formulating Government policy, and overseeing the role and functions of a range of other national bodies, mostly those established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To make government policy in this area effective, to meet the needs of a population of 50m people and service interactions that run into the hundreds of millions, it is important that policy is nuanced and subtle and takes account of differences in the needs of different demographics – for example establishing Accident and Emergency (A&E) policy in a way that responds to the needs of pregnant women whilst also responding to the needs of 85 year old diabetic men.
It is important that policy formulation is evidence based. DHSC analysts and officials will use data accessed via this agreement to explore and analyse these detailed datasets to provide insights that will inform policy decisions. They will also use the Data and evidence to respond appropriately to emergent challenges and issues, for example analysing in detail the impact on services from any pandemic contagious illnesses; providing actionable evidence and briefing to decision makers.
These duties include, but are not limited to the following elements of the 2006 Act:
1 Secretary of State's duty to promote a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement—
(a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and
(b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.
• 1A Duty as to improvement in quality of services
• 1B Duty as to the NHS Constitution
• 1C Duty as to reducing inequalities
• 1D Duty as to promoting autonomy
• 1E Duty as to research
• 1F Duty as to education and training
• 1G Secretary of State's duty as to reporting on and reviewing treatment of providers
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to protect and improve the health of the population under sections 2A and 2B of the NHS Act 2006 (as inserted by the Health and Social Care Act 2012):
In supporting the Secretary of State (SofS) in the delivery of the above tasks and duties, DHSC will use the data shared under this agreement to undertake
- Benchmarking;
- Provision of support services;
- Production of publications including contributing to national and regional publications;
- Support of the Government in the development and monitoring of policy;
- Early analysis for projects and programmes to support commissioning and policy decisions;
- Commissioning decisions;
- Responding to and answering of parliamentary questions in a timely fashion as part of statutory duties.
- Applying advanced analytical methods to the Data to allow policy formulation to take due account of variation in needs arising from characteristics of patients (demographics, combinations of diagnosis, pattern of interaction with services) and characteristics of health and care interactions in order to fulfil SofS’s responsibilities to deliver health and care services effectively, to deliver the greatest possible benefit to the health of the wider population and do both of these in a way that makes the best possible use of available resources.
The analysis conducted by DHSC is wide ranging and will most often be used for internal DHSC purposes. DHSC analysts do however also provide support across government and to other public sector organisations including No. 10 and Cabinet Office, Treasury, Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, NHS England, UK Health Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, Integrated Care Boards/Trusts and Local Authorities.
Department of Health & Social Care analysts are often required to carry out detailed analysis of data. This serves two broad purposes:
(i) In effect, to operate a focused research, analysis and discovery function: to use the Data to understand the nuance and subtlety of policy formulation and its potential impacts on particular groups of patients or public. This work includes the need to consider associations or correlations between different aspects of healthcare provision, to understand how services and policies relate to each other.
(ii) To respond urgently to requests for briefing; analysing detailed data to provide summary aggregate information that will allow policy decision makers (including Government Ministers) to address emergent challenges or issues and to make informed policy and service management decisions.
The following Data will be accessed as:
Aggregated (Small Numbers Unsuppressed)
Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL)
o Necessary to enable DHSC's analysts to conduct analysis to gain insights about the cancer pathways and cancer waiting times.. The aim is to inform DHSC senior officials and Ministers, and enable evidence-based decision-making relating to efforts to improve cancer waiting times.
Better Care Fund (BCF) –
o Necessary to help the system to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
Health Education England (HEE) Dental Training Posts –
o Necessary to better understand how dental trainees move through the training system, and where they are choosing to study.
Patient initiated follow up (PIFU) –
o Necessary to access counts of episodes discharged or moved to a Patient-Initiated Follow-up (PIFU) pathway, grouped by month and provider, extracted from the Provider Elective Recovery Outpatients Collection (EROC). This is so trusts’ performance can be monitored against NHSE’s target of 5% of outpatient attendances resulting in the patient being moved or discharged to a PIFU pathway. There is currently no published data for PIFU, so access to this dataset is required to monitor trust’s progress in PIFU implementation - one of the key Elective Recovery Outpatient transformations.
Specialist Advice Broken Down by Treatment Function
o Necessary to help policy makers to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs, particularly which treatment functions are performing better than others.
Virtual Wards
o Necessary to inform evidence on Getting It Right the First Time (GIRFT) Virtual Wards deep dives. These will help understand variation in services and allow trusts to understand how they compare with other trusts. This is informing a live policy issue around inconsistency in the delivery of Virtual Wards across trusts. This project involves working with 5 clinicians to use their expertise in this area, which will allow the analytical team to steer delivery and improve consistency of Virtual Ward services.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between August 2021 to the latest available
The following Data will be accessed as record-level pseudonymised
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) and All Age Continuing Care Dataset
o Necessary to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for His Majesty's Treasury (HMT). This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option.
o PLDS will allow for further understanding of the duration of care packages and the environments in which the care is delivered. Distributional analysis on the care packages will be carried out, to cost out the different options for CHC so that the health needs of this population can be met, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable the development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
Secondary Uses Service (SUS)
o In line with WLMDS and EPP request, SUS will be used for Policy analysis on Volume and Value of Elective Activity to inform progress on Govt/DHSC priority of reducing the elective waiting list within a fixed financial envelope. This analysis will be used to monitor progress of the elective reform plan and target live policy issues such as type and cost of elective activity. This dataset will allow us to further examine the change in elective activity due to case-mix and existing policy interventions. This will enable future policy interventions to target specific types of activity to help support the main priority of reducing the waiting list. It will also be used to support spending reviews, allowing us to evidence key assumptions underpinning these.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between May 2022 to the latest available
DHSC is the controller as the organisation responsible for ensuring that the Data will only be processed for the purpose described above.
The lawful basis for processing personal data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
The lawful basis for processing special category data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) based on Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject.
DHSC align with the statistical purposes limb of Article 9(2)(j).
Expected output
The following outputs will be produced for all the requested datasets:
- Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
- Written Reports and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
- Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
- An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data to be published publicly on gov.uk
The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
• Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
• Written reports/briefing documents and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
• Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
• An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data is published publicly on gov.uk
• Workshops with DHSC officials, Ministers NHS England and other government departments
Written reports/briefing documents and presentations are produced as and when requested.
Data Dashboards are refreshed in line with the refresh frequency of the data underlying them.
The report on the Discharge Fund is produced annually.
The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.
For virtual wards data, the team expect to produce at least the following outputs – summary tables at trust level for:
• acuity of patients within virtual wards
• length of stay within virtual wards
• occupancy within virtual wards
• level of remote monitoring within virtual wards
With SUS data, national, regional and provider tables on information about elective activity split by type of activity, value of activity, treatment function etc. will be produced. This will also include value of activity, which can be used to monitor overall cost of elective activity, which is important for financial monitoring.
Benefits reported
The” Specialist advice broken down by treatment” dataset has been used in some regular reporting outputs which have now been automated. These regularly feed into policy discussions and provide them with key analysis informing on variation across providers, ICBs and treatment functions and more technical work analysing the impact of specialist advice on elective demand which it was set up to do. This work has been significant, feeding into elective modelling ahead of the spending review which has informed a better value for money bid.
DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v3.3 8 August 2025 to 7 August 2028
- Title
- NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
- Commercial
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Datasets
- 8
- Files released
- 0
Datasets: Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund; Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL); Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL; HEE Dental Training Posts; Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU); Secondary Uses Service - UDAL; Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL; Virtual Wards - UDAL
What changed from DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v2.3
Text removed is struck through; text added is underlined. Unchanged paragraphs are summarised rather than repeated.
| Field | Was | Became |
|---|---|---|
| Start date | 2025-08-08 | |
| End date | 2028-08-07 | |
| Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund: common law duty of confidentiality | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent | |
| Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL): common law duty of confidentiality | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent | |
| Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL: common law duty of confidentiality | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent | |
| HEE Dental Training Posts: common law duty of confidentiality | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent | |
| Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU): common law duty of confidentiality | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent | |
| Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL: common law duty of confidentiality | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent | |
| Virtual Wards - UDAL: common law duty of confidentiality | Statutory exemption to flow confidential data without consent |
Datasets: + Secondary Uses Service - UDAL
Objective for processing
[50 paragraphs unchanged] Secondary Uses Service (SUS) o In line with WLMDS and EPP request, SuS will be used for Policy analysis on Volume and Value of Elective Activity to inform progress on Govt/DHSC priority of reducing the elective waiting list within a fixed financial envelope. This analysis will be used to monitor progress of the elective reform plan and target live policy issues such as type and cost of elective activity. This dataset will allow us to further examine the change in elective activity due to case-mix and existing policy interventions. This will enable future policy interventions to target specific types of activity to help support the main priority of reducing the waiting list. It will also be used to support spending reviews, allowing us to evidence key assumptions underpinning these. [8 paragraphs unchanged]
Expected output
[20 paragraphs unchanged] With SUS data, national, regional and provider tables on information about elective activity split by type of activity, value of activity, treatment function etc. will be produced. This will also include value of activity, which can be used to monitor overall cost of elective activity, which is important for financial monitoring.
Expected measurable benefits
[31 paragraphs unchanged] SUS • Monitoring and progress of key policy interventions for elective waiting list. This analysis will inform live policy decisions on further interventions needed to reduce the waiting list from over 7 million to under 4 million - the level required to meet the Govt priority aim that 92% of people will be seen within 18 weeks. This is expected to improve patient experience with the NHS given the length of waiting times. Reducing the elective waiting list will also have indirect positive health and labour market impacts, such as supporting the Govt's key agenda of reducing economic inactivity.
Unchanged: Processing activities, Benefits reported.
Objective for processing
The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) requires access to NHS England data for the purpose of data analysis aimed at supporting policy development under the duties of the Secretary of State for Health set out within the National Health Service Act 2006. These duties are set out in the 2006 Act, but relate more generally to the role and purpose of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the role of the Department of Health and Social Care as the relevant Department of State, exercising these executive functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. In general terms, these purposes are to deliver health and care services in the most effective way possible; to deliver the best possible health for the population and to do both of those in a way that makes best use of available resources.
The Department does this by formulating Government policy, and overseeing the role and functions of a range of other national bodies, mostly those established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To make government policy in this area effective, to meet the needs of a population of 50m people and service interactions that run into the hundreds of millions, it is important that policy is nuanced and subtle and takes account of differences in the needs of different demographics – for example establishing Accident and Emergency (A&E) policy in a way that responds to the needs of pregnant women whilst also responding to the needs of 85 year old diabetic men.
It is important that policy formulation is evidence based. DHSC analysts and officials will use data accessed via this agreement to explore and analyse these detailed datasets to provide insights that will inform policy decisions. They will also use the Data and evidence to respond appropriately to emergent challenges and issues, for example analysing in detail the impact on services from any pandemic contagious illnesses; providing actionable evidence and briefing to decision makers.
These duties include, but are not limited to the following elements of the 2006 Act:
1 Secretary of State's duty to promote a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement—
(a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and
(b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.
• 1A Duty as to improvement in quality of services
• 1B Duty as to the NHS Constitution
• 1C Duty as to reducing inequalities
• 1D Duty as to promoting autonomy
• 1E Duty as to research
• 1F Duty as to education and training
• 1G Secretary of State's duty as to reporting on and reviewing treatment of providers
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to protect and improve the health of the population under sections 2A and 2B of the NHS Act 2006 (as inserted by the Health and Social Care Act 2012):
In supporting the Secretary of State (SofS) in the delivery of the above tasks and duties, DHSC will use the data shared under this agreement to undertake
- Benchmarking;
- Provision of support services;
- Production of publications including contributing to national and regional publications;
- Support of the Government in the development and monitoring of policy;
- Early analysis for projects and programmes to support commissioning and policy decisions;
- Commissioning decisions;
- Responding to and answering of parliamentary questions in a timely fashion as part of statutory duties.
- Applying advanced analytical methods to the Data to allow policy formulation to take due account of variation in needs arising from characteristics of patients (demographics, combinations of diagnosis, pattern of interaction with services) and characteristics of health and care interactions in order to fulfil SofS’s responsibilities to deliver health and care services effectively, to deliver the greatest possible benefit to the health of the wider population and do both of these in a way that makes the best possible use of available resources.
The analysis conducted by DHSC is wide ranging and will most often be used for internal DHSC purposes. DHSC analysts do however also provide support across government and to other public sector organisations including No. 10 and Cabinet Office, Treasury, Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, NHS England, UK Health Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, Integrated Care Boards/Trusts and Local Authorities.
Department of Health & Social Care analysts are often required to carry out detailed analysis of data. This serves two broad purposes:
(i) In effect, to operate a focused research, analysis and discovery function: to use the Data to understand the nuance and subtlety of policy formulation and its potential impacts on particular groups of patients or public. This work includes the need to consider associations or correlations between different aspects of healthcare provision, to understand how services and policies relate to each other.
(ii) To respond urgently to requests for briefing; analysing detailed data to provide summary aggregate information that will allow policy decision makers (including Government Ministers) to address emergent challenges or issues and to make informed policy and service management decisions.
The following Data will be accessed as:
Aggregated (Small Numbers Unsuppressed)
Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL)
o Necessary to enable DHSC's analysts to conduct analysis to gain insights about the cancer pathways and cancer waiting times.. The aim is to inform DHSC senior officials and Ministers, and enable evidence-based decision-making relating to efforts to improve cancer waiting times.
Better Care Fund (BCF) –
o Necessary to help the system to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
Health Education England (HEE) Dental Training Posts –
o Necessary to better understand how dental trainees move through the training system, and where they are choosing to study.
Patient initiated follow up (PIFU) –
o Necessary to access counts of episodes discharged or moved to a Patient-Initiated Follow-up (PIFU) pathway, grouped by month and provider, extracted from the Provider Elective Recovery Outpatients Collection (EROC). This is so trusts’ performance can be monitored against NHSE’s target of 5% of outpatient attendances resulting in the patient being moved or discharged to a PIFU pathway. There is currently no published data for PIFU, so access to this dataset is required to monitor trust’s progress in PIFU implementation - one of the key Elective Recovery Outpatient transformations.
Specialist Advice Broken Down by Treatment Function
o Necessary to help policy makers to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs, particularly which treatment functions are performing better than others.
Virtual Wards
o Necessary to inform evidence on Getting It Right the First Time (GIRFT) Virtual Wards deep dives. These will help understand variation in services and allow trusts to understand how they compare with other trusts. This is informing a live policy issue around inconsistency in the delivery of Virtual Wards across trusts. This project involves working with 5 clinicians to use their expertise in this area, which will allow the analytical team to steer delivery and improve consistency of Virtual Ward services.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between August 2021 to the latest available
The following Data will be accessed as record-level pseudonymised
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC)
o Necessary to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for His Majesty's Treasury (HMT). This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option.
o PLDS will allow for further understanding of the duration of care packages and the environments in which the care is delivered. Distributional analysis on the care packages will be carried out, to cost out the different options for CHC so that the health needs of this population can be met, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable the development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
Secondary Uses Service (SUS)
o In line with WLMDS and EPP request, SuS will be used for Policy analysis on Volume and Value of Elective Activity to inform progress on Govt/DHSC priority of reducing the elective waiting list within a fixed financial envelope. This analysis will be used to monitor progress of the elective reform plan and target live policy issues such as type and cost of elective activity. This dataset will allow us to further examine the change in elective activity due to case-mix and existing policy interventions. This will enable future policy interventions to target specific types of activity to help support the main priority of reducing the waiting list. It will also be used to support spending reviews, allowing us to evidence key assumptions underpinning these.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between May 2022 to the latest available
DHSC is the controller as the organisation responsible for ensuring that the Data will only be processed for the purpose described above.
The lawful basis for processing personal data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
The lawful basis for processing special category data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) based on Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject.
DHSC align with the statistical purposes limb of Article 9(2)(j).
Expected output
The following outputs will be produced for all the requested datasets:
- Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
- Written Reports and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
- Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
- An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data to be published publicly on gov.uk
The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
• Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
• Written reports/briefing documents and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
• Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
• An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data is published publicly on gov.uk
• Workshops with DHSC officials, Ministers NHS England and other government departments
Written reports/briefing documents and presentations are produced as and when requested.
Data Dashboards are refreshed in line with the refresh frequency of the data underlying them.
The report on the Discharge Fund is produced annually.
The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.
For virtual wards data, the team expect to produce at least the following outputs – summary tables at trust level for:
• acuity of patients within virtual wards
• length of stay within virtual wards
• occupancy within virtual wards
• level of remote monitoring within virtual wards
With SUS data, national, regional and provider tables on information about elective activity split by type of activity, value of activity, treatment function etc. will be produced. This will also include value of activity, which can be used to monitor overall cost of elective activity, which is important for financial monitoring.
Benefits reported
The” Specialist advice broken down by treatment” dataset has been used in some regular reporting outputs which have now been automated. These regularly feed into policy discussions and provide them with key analysis informing on variation across providers, ICBs and treatment functions and more technical work analysing the impact of specialist advice on elective demand which it was set up to do. This work has been significant, feeding into elective modelling ahead of the spending review which has informed a better value for money bid.
DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v2.3 13 June 2025 to 9 July 2028
- Title
- NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
- Commercial
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Datasets
- 7
- Files released
- 0
Datasets: Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund; Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL); Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL; HEE Dental Training Posts; Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU); Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL; Virtual Wards - UDAL
What changed from DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v1.2
Text removed is struck through; text added is underlined. Unchanged paragraphs are summarised rather than repeated.
| Field | Was | Became |
|---|---|---|
| Start date | 2025-06-13 |
Datasets: + Virtual Wards - UDAL
Objective for processing
[42 paragraphs unchanged] Virtual Wards o Necessary to inform evidence on Getting It Right the First Time (GIRFT) Virtual Wards deep dives. These will help understand variation in services and allow trusts to understand how they compare with other trusts. This is informing a live policy issue around inconsistency in the delivery of Virtual Wards across trusts. This project involves working with 5 clinicians to use their expertise in this area, which will allow the analytical team to steer delivery and improve consistency of Virtual Ward services. [14 paragraphs unchanged]
Expected output
[15 paragraphs unchanged] For virtual wards data, the team expect to produce at least the following outputs – summary tables at trust level for: • acuity of patients within virtual wards • length of stay within virtual wards • occupancy within virtual wards • level of remote monitoring within virtual wards
Expected measurable benefits
[27 paragraphs unchanged] Virtual Wards • Reduced variation across services as trusts learn best practice, which is expected to lead to better outcomes for patients. [2 paragraphs unchanged]
Unchanged: Processing activities, Benefits reported.
Objective for processing
The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) requires access to NHS England data for the purpose of data analysis aimed at supporting policy development under the duties of the Secretary of State for Health set out within the National Health Service Act 2006. These duties are set out in the 2006 Act, but relate more generally to the role and purpose of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the role of the Department of Health and Social Care as the relevant Department of State, exercising these executive functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. In general terms, these purposes are to deliver health and care services in the most effective way possible; to deliver the best possible health for the population and to do both of those in a way that makes best use of available resources.
The Department does this by formulating Government policy, and overseeing the role and functions of a range of other national bodies, mostly those established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To make government policy in this area effective, to meet the needs of a population of 50m people and service interactions that run into the hundreds of millions, it is important that policy is nuanced and subtle and takes account of differences in the needs of different demographics – for example establishing Accident and Emergency (A&E) policy in a way that responds to the needs of pregnant women whilst also responding to the needs of 85 year old diabetic men.
It is important that policy formulation is evidence based. DHSC analysts and officials will use data accessed via this agreement to explore and analyse these detailed datasets to provide insights that will inform policy decisions. They will also use the Data and evidence to respond appropriately to emergent challenges and issues, for example analysing in detail the impact on services from any pandemic contagious illnesses; providing actionable evidence and briefing to decision makers.
These duties include, but are not limited to the following elements of the 2006 Act:
1 Secretary of State's duty to promote a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement—
(a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and
(b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.
• 1A Duty as to improvement in quality of services
• 1B Duty as to the NHS Constitution
• 1C Duty as to reducing inequalities
• 1D Duty as to promoting autonomy
• 1E Duty as to research
• 1F Duty as to education and training
• 1G Secretary of State's duty as to reporting on and reviewing treatment of providers
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to protect and improve the health of the population under sections 2A and 2B of the NHS Act 2006 (as inserted by the Health and Social Care Act 2012):
In supporting the Secretary of State (SofS) in the delivery of the above tasks and duties, DHSC will use the data shared under this agreement to undertake
- Benchmarking;
- Provision of support services;
- Production of publications including contributing to national and regional publications;
- Support of the Government in the development and monitoring of policy;
- Early analysis for projects and programmes to support commissioning and policy decisions;
- Commissioning decisions;
- Responding to and answering of parliamentary questions in a timely fashion as part of statutory duties.
- Applying advanced analytical methods to the Data to allow policy formulation to take due account of variation in needs arising from characteristics of patients (demographics, combinations of diagnosis, pattern of interaction with services) and characteristics of health and care interactions in order to fulfil SofS’s responsibilities to deliver health and care services effectively, to deliver the greatest possible benefit to the health of the wider population and do both of these in a way that makes the best possible use of available resources.
The analysis conducted by DHSC is wide ranging and will most often be used for internal DHSC purposes. DHSC analysts do however also provide support across government and to other public sector organisations including No. 10 and Cabinet Office, Treasury, Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, NHS England, UK Health Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, Integrated Care Boards/Trusts and Local Authorities.
Department of Health & Social Care analysts are often required to carry out detailed analysis of data. This serves two broad purposes:
(i) In effect, to operate a focused research, analysis and discovery function: to use the Data to understand the nuance and subtlety of policy formulation and its potential impacts on particular groups of patients or public. This work includes the need to consider associations or correlations between different aspects of healthcare provision, to understand how services and policies relate to each other.
(ii) To respond urgently to requests for briefing; analysing detailed data to provide summary aggregate information that will allow policy decision makers (including Government Ministers) to address emergent challenges or issues and to make informed policy and service management decisions.
The following Data will be accessed as:
Aggregated (Small Numbers Unsuppressed)
Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL)
o Necessary to enable DHSC's analysts to conduct analysis to gain insights about the cancer pathways and cancer waiting times.. The aim is to inform DHSC senior officials and Ministers, and enable evidence-based decision-making relating to efforts to improve cancer waiting times.
Better Care Fund (BCF) –
o Necessary to help the system to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
Health Education England (HEE) Dental Training Posts –
o Necessary to better understand how dental trainees move through the training system, and where they are choosing to study.
Patient initiated follow up (PIFU) –
o Necessary to access counts of episodes discharged or moved to a Patient-Initiated Follow-up (PIFU) pathway, grouped by month and provider, extracted from the Provider Elective Recovery Outpatients Collection (EROC). This is so trusts’ performance can be monitored against NHSE’s target of 5% of outpatient attendances resulting in the patient being moved or discharged to a PIFU pathway. There is currently no published data for PIFU, so access to this dataset is required to monitor trust’s progress in PIFU implementation - one of the key Elective Recovery Outpatient transformations.
Specialist Advice Broken Down by Treatment Function
o Necessary to help policy makers to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs, particularly which treatment functions are performing better than others.
Virtual Wards
o Necessary to inform evidence on Getting It Right the First Time (GIRFT) Virtual Wards deep dives. These will help understand variation in services and allow trusts to understand how they compare with other trusts. This is informing a live policy issue around inconsistency in the delivery of Virtual Wards across trusts. This project involves working with 5 clinicians to use their expertise in this area, which will allow the analytical team to steer delivery and improve consistency of Virtual Ward services.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between August 2021 to the latest available
The following Data will be accessed as record-level pseudonymised
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC)
o Necessary to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for His Majesty's Treasury (HMT). This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option.
o PLDS will allow for further understanding of the duration of care packages and the environments in which the care is delivered. Distributional analysis on the care packages will be carried out, to cost out the different options for CHC so that the health needs of this population can be met, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable the development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between May 2022 to the latest available
DHSC is the controller as the organisation responsible for ensuring that the Data will only be processed for the purpose described above.
The lawful basis for processing personal data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
The lawful basis for processing special category data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) based on Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject.
DHSC align with the statistical purposes limb of Article 9(2)(j).
Expected output
The following outputs will be produced for all the requested datasets:
- Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
- Written Reports and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
- Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
- An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data to be published publicly on gov.uk
The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
• Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
• Written reports/briefing documents and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
• Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
• An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data is published publicly on gov.uk
• Workshops with DHSC officials, Ministers NHS England and other government departments
Written reports/briefing documents and presentations are produced as and when requested.
Data Dashboards are refreshed in line with the refresh frequency of the data underlying them.
The report on the Discharge Fund is produced annually.
The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.
For virtual wards data, the team expect to produce at least the following outputs – summary tables at trust level for:
• acuity of patients within virtual wards
• length of stay within virtual wards
• occupancy within virtual wards
• level of remote monitoring within virtual wards
Benefits reported
The” Specialist advice broken down by treatment” dataset has been used in some regular reporting outputs which have now been automated. These regularly feed into policy discussions and provide them with key analysis informing on variation across providers, ICBs and treatment functions and more technical work analysing the impact of specialist advice on elective demand which it was set up to do. This work has been significant, feeding into elective modelling ahead of the spending review which has informed a better value for money bid.
DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v1.2 18 April 2025 to 9 July 2028
- Title
- NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
- Commercial
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Datasets
- 6
- Files released
- 0
Datasets: Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund; Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL); Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL; HEE Dental Training Posts; Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU); Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL
What changed from DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v0.2
Text removed is struck through; text added is underlined. Unchanged paragraphs are summarised rather than repeated.
| Field | Was | Became |
|---|---|---|
| Start date | 2025-04-18 | |
| End date | 2028-07-09 |
Datasets: + Continuing Healthcare Dataset_UDAL
Objective for processing
[28 paragraphs unchanged]
The following Data will be
accessed:
accessed as:
Aggregated (Small Numbers Unsuppressed)
[12 paragraphs unchanged]
The level of the Data will be:
- Aggregated, small numbers unsuppressed
[2 paragraphs unchanged]
The following Data will be accessed as record-level pseudonymised
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC)
o Necessary to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for His Majesty's Treasury (HMT). This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option.
o PLDS will allow for further understanding of the duration of care packages and the environments in which the care is delivered. Distributional analysis on the care packages will be carried out, to cost out the different options for CHC so that the health needs of this population can be met, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable the development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between May 2022 to the latest available
[6 paragraphs unchanged]
Processing activities
[1 paragraph unchanged]
NHS England will share data with DHSC via the Unified Data Access Layer
(UDAL) data share*.
(UDAL).
UDAL is a data management system within NHS England that enables patient data to be processed and made available for analytical purposes.
*The data will be shared via the "Data Share" Service. This entails a data provider (NHS England UDAL) and a data consumer (DHSC’s DAC platform), where the provider (NHS England) is in control of who receives data, when it is updated and how frequently.
UDAL accommodates a series of tools, which enable users to explore patient or aggregate data, to create standardised reports and dashboards, and create statistical models.
NHS England will provide access to the relevant records from the datasets described in this Data Sharing Agreement to DHSC. The Data will contain no direct identifying data items and there will be no requirement and no attempt to reidentify individuals when using the Data. Where the Data is pseudonymised, individuals cannot be reidentified through linkage with other data in the possession of the Recipient. As well as accessing data via UDAL, DHSC will be sent aggregate datasets via the UDAL "Data Share" Service. This entails a data provider (NHS England UDAL) and a data consumer (DHSC’s DAC platform), where the provider (NHS England) is in control of who receives data, when it is updated and how frequently.
[1 paragraph unchanged]
DHSC has built an in-house data platform (the DHSC Analytical Cloud (DAC) Platform) that will gather predominantly aggregated data from a variety of data sources, such as Foundry and published statistics and data provided under this DSA and provide a master version of these sources for all DHSC analysts to use. This will ensure that DHSC request aggregated data from NHSE once and enforce the use of the master version across the analytical community.
[13 paragraphs unchanged]
As the data supplied is aggregate data, there will be no requirement and no attempt to reidentify individuals when using the Data.
Expected measurable benefits
[27 paragraphs unchanged] Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC) • The current Standard CHC system in unsustainable, given the recent increase in costs, reduced eligibility and the current economic position. So DHSC need to map out costed reform options to ensure best outcomes for patients, that is financially sustainable. This will ensure that people are receiving the right level of care and allow us to develop clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future. Furthermore, this analysis will help inform the Casey Commission into Social Care.
Benefits reported
Yielded Benefits is not a requirement for new applications.
The” Specialist advice broken down by treatment” dataset has been used in some regular reporting outputs which have now been automated. These regularly feed into policy discussions and provide them with key analysis informing on variation across providers, ICBs and treatment functions and more technical work analysing the impact of specialist advice on elective demand which it was set up to do. This work has been significant, feeding into elective modelling ahead of the spending review which has informed a better value for money bid.
Unchanged: Expected output.
Objective for processing
The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) requires access to NHS England data for the purpose of data analysis aimed at supporting policy development under the duties of the Secretary of State for Health set out within the National Health Service Act 2006. These duties are set out in the 2006 Act, but relate more generally to the role and purpose of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the role of the Department of Health and Social Care as the relevant Department of State, exercising these executive functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. In general terms, these purposes are to deliver health and care services in the most effective way possible; to deliver the best possible health for the population and to do both of those in a way that makes best use of available resources.
The Department does this by formulating Government policy, and overseeing the role and functions of a range of other national bodies, mostly those established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To make government policy in this area effective, to meet the needs of a population of 50m people and service interactions that run into the hundreds of millions, it is important that policy is nuanced and subtle and takes account of differences in the needs of different demographics – for example establishing Accident and Emergency (A&E) policy in a way that responds to the needs of pregnant women whilst also responding to the needs of 85 year old diabetic men.
It is important that policy formulation is evidence based. DHSC analysts and officials will use data accessed via this agreement to explore and analyse these detailed datasets to provide insights that will inform policy decisions. They will also use the Data and evidence to respond appropriately to emergent challenges and issues, for example analysing in detail the impact on services from any pandemic contagious illnesses; providing actionable evidence and briefing to decision makers.
These duties include, but are not limited to the following elements of the 2006 Act:
1 Secretary of State's duty to promote a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement—
(a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and
(b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.
• 1A Duty as to improvement in quality of services
• 1B Duty as to the NHS Constitution
• 1C Duty as to reducing inequalities
• 1D Duty as to promoting autonomy
• 1E Duty as to research
• 1F Duty as to education and training
• 1G Secretary of State's duty as to reporting on and reviewing treatment of providers
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to protect and improve the health of the population under sections 2A and 2B of the NHS Act 2006 (as inserted by the Health and Social Care Act 2012):
In supporting the Secretary of State (SofS) in the delivery of the above tasks and duties, DHSC will use the data shared under this agreement to undertake
- Benchmarking;
- Provision of support services;
- Production of publications including contributing to national and regional publications;
- Support of the Government in the development and monitoring of policy;
- Early analysis for projects and programmes to support commissioning and policy decisions;
- Commissioning decisions;
- Responding to and answering of parliamentary questions in a timely fashion as part of statutory duties.
- Applying advanced analytical methods to the Data to allow policy formulation to take due account of variation in needs arising from characteristics of patients (demographics, combinations of diagnosis, pattern of interaction with services) and characteristics of health and care interactions in order to fulfil SofS’s responsibilities to deliver health and care services effectively, to deliver the greatest possible benefit to the health of the wider population and do both of these in a way that makes the best possible use of available resources.
The analysis conducted by DHSC is wide ranging and will most often be used for internal DHSC purposes. DHSC analysts do however also provide support across government and to other public sector organisations including No. 10 and Cabinet Office, Treasury, Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, NHS England, UK Health Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, Integrated Care Boards/Trusts and Local Authorities.
Department of Health & Social Care analysts are often required to carry out detailed analysis of data. This serves two broad purposes:
(i) In effect, to operate a focused research, analysis and discovery function: to use the Data to understand the nuance and subtlety of policy formulation and its potential impacts on particular groups of patients or public. This work includes the need to consider associations or correlations between different aspects of healthcare provision, to understand how services and policies relate to each other.
(ii) To respond urgently to requests for briefing; analysing detailed data to provide summary aggregate information that will allow policy decision makers (including Government Ministers) to address emergent challenges or issues and to make informed policy and service management decisions.
The following Data will be accessed as:
Aggregated (Small Numbers Unsuppressed)
Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL)
o Necessary to enable DHSC's analysts to conduct analysis to gain insights about the cancer pathways and cancer waiting times.. The aim is to inform DHSC senior officials and Ministers, and enable evidence-based decision-making relating to efforts to improve cancer waiting times.
Better Care Fund (BCF) –
o Necessary to help the system to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
Health Education England (HEE) Dental Training Posts –
o Necessary to better understand how dental trainees move through the training system, and where they are choosing to study.
Patient initiated follow up (PIFU) –
o Necessary to access counts of episodes discharged or moved to a Patient-Initiated Follow-up (PIFU) pathway, grouped by month and provider, extracted from the Provider Elective Recovery Outpatients Collection (EROC). This is so trusts’ performance can be monitored against NHSE’s target of 5% of outpatient attendances resulting in the patient being moved or discharged to a PIFU pathway. There is currently no published data for PIFU, so access to this dataset is required to monitor trust’s progress in PIFU implementation - one of the key Elective Recovery Outpatient transformations.
Specialist Advice Broken Down by Treatment Function
o Necessary to help policy makers to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs, particularly which treatment functions are performing better than others.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between August 2021 to the latest available
The following Data will be accessed as record-level pseudonymised
Continuing Healthcare Dataset (CHC)
o Necessary to provide ministers with costed reform options for CHC, and for commissions for His Majesty's Treasury (HMT). This will take the form of a submission to ministers with a summary of the current system, and costs of any potential reform option.
o PLDS will allow for further understanding of the duration of care packages and the environments in which the care is delivered. Distributional analysis on the care packages will be carried out, to cost out the different options for CHC so that the health needs of this population can be met, without the costs increasing unsustainably. It will also enable the development of clearer eligibility criteria for people who need complex care in future.
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between May 2022 to the latest available
DHSC is the controller as the organisation responsible for ensuring that the Data will only be processed for the purpose described above.
The lawful basis for processing personal data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
The lawful basis for processing special category data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) based on Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject.
DHSC align with the statistical purposes limb of Article 9(2)(j).
Expected output
The following outputs will be produced for all the requested datasets:
- Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
- Written Reports and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
- Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
- An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data to be published publicly on gov.uk
The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
• Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
• Written reports/briefing documents and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
• Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
• An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data is published publicly on gov.uk
• Workshops with DHSC officials, Ministers NHS England and other government departments
Written reports/briefing documents and presentations are produced as and when requested.
Data Dashboards are refreshed in line with the refresh frequency of the data underlying them.
The report on the Discharge Fund is produced annually.
The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.
Benefits reported
The” Specialist advice broken down by treatment” dataset has been used in some regular reporting outputs which have now been automated. These regularly feed into policy discussions and provide them with key analysis informing on variation across providers, ICBs and treatment functions and more technical work analysing the impact of specialist advice on elective demand which it was set up to do. This work has been significant, feeding into elective modelling ahead of the spending review which has informed a better value for money bid.
DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v0.2 10 July 2024 to 9 July 2025
- Title
- NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis
- Commercial
- No
- Sublicensing
- No
- Datasets
- 5
- Files released
- 0
Datasets: Better Care Fund - Additional Discharge Fund; Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL); HEE Dental Training Posts; Patient Initiated Follow Up (PIFU); Specialist Advice Broken Down By Treatment Function - UDAL
Objective for processing
The Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) requires access to NHS England data for the purpose of data analysis aimed at supporting policy development under the duties of the Secretary of State for Health set out within the National Health Service Act 2006. These duties are set out in the 2006 Act, but relate more generally to the role and purpose of the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and the role of the Department of Health and Social Care as the relevant Department of State, exercising these executive functions on behalf of the Secretary of State. In general terms, these purposes are to deliver health and care services in the most effective way possible; to deliver the best possible health for the population and to do both of those in a way that makes best use of available resources.
The Department does this by formulating Government policy, and overseeing the role and functions of a range of other national bodies, mostly those established by the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To make government policy in this area effective, to meet the needs of a population of 50m people and service interactions that run into the hundreds of millions, it is important that policy is nuanced and subtle and takes account of differences in the needs of different demographics – for example establishing Accident and Emergency (A&E) policy in a way that responds to the needs of pregnant women whilst also responding to the needs of 85 year old diabetic men.
It is important that policy formulation is evidence based. DHSC analysts and officials will use data accessed via this agreement to explore and analyse these detailed datasets to provide insights that will inform policy decisions. They will also use the Data and evidence to respond appropriately to emergent challenges and issues, for example analysing in detail the impact on services from any pandemic contagious illnesses; providing actionable evidence and briefing to decision makers.
These duties include, but are not limited to the following elements of the 2006 Act:
1 Secretary of State's duty to promote a comprehensive health service designed to secure improvement—
(a) in the physical and mental health of the people of England, and
(b) in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of physical and mental illness.
• 1A Duty as to improvement in quality of services
• 1B Duty as to the NHS Constitution
• 1C Duty as to reducing inequalities
• 1D Duty as to promoting autonomy
• 1E Duty as to research
• 1F Duty as to education and training
• 1G Secretary of State's duty as to reporting on and reviewing treatment of providers
The Secretary of State has a statutory duty to protect and improve the health of the population under sections 2A and 2B of the NHS Act 2006 (as inserted by the Health and Social Care Act 2012):
In supporting the Secretary of State (SofS) in the delivery of the above tasks and duties, DHSC will use the data shared under this agreement to undertake
- Benchmarking;
- Provision of support services;
- Production of publications including contributing to national and regional publications;
- Support of the Government in the development and monitoring of policy;
- Early analysis for projects and programmes to support commissioning and policy decisions;
- Commissioning decisions;
- Responding to and answering of parliamentary questions in a timely fashion as part of statutory duties.
- Applying advanced analytical methods to the Data to allow policy formulation to take due account of variation in needs arising from characteristics of patients (demographics, combinations of diagnosis, pattern of interaction with services) and characteristics of health and care interactions in order to fulfil SofS’s responsibilities to deliver health and care services effectively, to deliver the greatest possible benefit to the health of the wider population and do both of these in a way that makes the best possible use of available resources.
The analysis conducted by DHSC is wide ranging and will most often be used for internal DHSC purposes. DHSC analysts do however also provide support across government and to other public sector organisations including No. 10 and Cabinet Office, Treasury, Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, NHS England, UK Health Security Agency, NHS Blood and Transplant, Integrated Care Boards/Trusts and Local Authorities.
Department of Health & Social Care analysts are often required to carry out detailed analysis of data. This serves two broad purposes:
(i) In effect, to operate a focused research, analysis and discovery function: to use the Data to understand the nuance and subtlety of policy formulation and its potential impacts on particular groups of patients or public. This work includes the need to consider associations or correlations between different aspects of healthcare provision, to understand how services and policies relate to each other.
(ii) To respond urgently to requests for briefing; analysing detailed data to provide summary aggregate information that will allow policy decision makers (including Government Ministers) to address emergent challenges or issues and to make informed policy and service management decisions.
The following Data will be accessed:
Cancer Patient Tracking List (CANPTL)
o Necessary to enable DHSC's analysts to conduct analysis to gain insights about the cancer pathways and cancer waiting times.. The aim is to inform DHSC senior officials and Ministers, and enable evidence-based decision-making relating to efforts to improve cancer waiting times.
Better Care Fund (BCF) –
o Necessary to help the system to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Lead to the identification or improvement of treatments or interventions, or health and care system design to improve health and care outcomes or experience.
Health Education England (HEE) Dental Training Posts –
o Necessary to better understand how dental trainees move through the training system, and where they are choosing to study.
Patient initiated follow up (PIFU) –
o Necessary to access counts of episodes discharged or moved to a Patient-Initiated Follow-up (PIFU) pathway, grouped by month and provider, extracted from the Provider Elective Recovery Outpatients Collection (EROC). This is so trusts’ performance can be monitored against NHSE’s target of 5% of outpatient attendances resulting in the patient being moved or discharged to a PIFU pathway. There is currently no published data for PIFU, so access to this dataset is required to monitor trust’s progress in PIFU implementation - one of the key Elective Recovery Outpatient transformations.
Specialist Advice Broken Down by Treatment Function
o Necessary to help policy makers to better understand the health and care needs of the population.
o Advance understanding of regional and national trends in health and social care needs, particularly which treatment functions are performing better than others.
The level of the Data will be:
- Aggregated, small numbers unsuppressed
The data will be minimised as follows;
- Limited to data between August 2021 to the latest available
DHSC is the controller as the organisation responsible for ensuring that the Data will only be processed for the purpose described above.
The lawful basis for processing personal data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 6(1)(e) - processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;
The lawful basis for processing special category data under the UK GDPR is:
Article 9(2)(j) - processing is necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) based on Union or Member State law which shall be proportionate to the aim pursued, respect the essence of the right to data protection and provide for suitable and specific measures to safeguard the fundamental rights and the interests of the data subject.
DHSC align with the statistical purposes limb of Article 9(2)(j).
Expected output
The following outputs will be produced for all the requested datasets:
- Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
- Written Reports and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
- Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
- An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data to be published publicly on gov.uk
The outputs will be communicated to relevant recipients through the following dissemination channels:
• Data dashboards for internal use within DHSC
• Written reports/briefing documents and presentations to DHSC senior officials, Ministers, policy colleagues, and potentially NHS England, No.10 and His Majesty's Treasury (HMT).
• Creation of software tools to track metrics internally within DHSC
• An aggregated summary end of year report on the Discharge Fund using the Better Care Fund data is published publicly on gov.uk
• Workshops with DHSC officials, Ministers NHS England and other government departments
Written reports/briefing documents and presentations are produced as and when requested.
Data Dashboards are refreshed in line with the refresh frequency of the data underlying them.
The report on the Discharge Fund is produced annually.
The outputs will not contain NHS England Data and will only contain aggregated information with small numbers suppressed as appropriate in line with the relevant disclosure rules for the dataset(s) from which the information was derived.
Benefits reported
Yielded Benefits is not a requirement for new applications.
Register history
When this agreement appeared in, or was edited in, each monthly edition of the register. Built by comparing every edition this site holds.
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August 2024 —
first listed. 1 version: DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v0.2
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May 2025
1 version added: DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v1.2
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July 2025
1 version added: DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v2.3
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September 2025
1 version added: DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v3.3
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December 2025
1 version added: DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v4.5
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May 2026
1 version added: DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v5.3
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July 2026
1 version added: DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S-v6.2
Cite this page
NHS England (2026) Data Uses Register, September 2026 edition, agreement DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S, “NHSE UDAL - DHSC - Enabling Policy Analysis”. Read via NHS Data Access Explorer (unofficial), https://healthdatauses.uk/agreements/dars-nic-759355-h7b9s/ (accessed [date]).
This address stays the same, but the page is rebuilt with each monthly edition, so the citation names the edition it shows. Every edition's data is kept in the facts store.
Source: datausesregister_september2026.xlsx, September 2026 edition of the NHS England Data Uses Register. Search that workbook for DARS-NIC-759355-H7B9S to see the original rows.