NHS Digital Data Release Register - reformatted
Home Office projects
11 data files in total were disseminated unsafely (information about files used safely is missing for TRE/"system access" projects).
Hospitalisation from serious violence — DARS-NIC-612092-Q0Y6F
Type of data: information not disclosed for TRE projects
Opt outs honoured: Anonymised - ICO Code Compliant, No (Does not include the flow of confidential data)
Legal basis: Health and Social Care Act 2012 - s261 - 'Other dissemination of information'
Purposes: No (Ministerial Department)
Sensitive: Non-Sensitive
When:DSA runs 2022-01-28 — 2025-01-27 2022.01 — 2024.03.
Access method: Ongoing
Data-controller type: HOME OFFICE
Sublicensing allowed: No
Datasets:
- Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care
- Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care (HES APC)
Outputs:
There are several outputs for the data processing. Ministerial reports, presentations and slides with monitoring of trends and basic descriptive statistics for internal-to-government and police audiences, and dashboards for internal audiences and ministers and police/Police and Crime Commissioners. The ministerial reports occur at least on a monthly basis so the first of these is intended to be produced in January 2022 and then at monthly intervals thereafter. Data used in evaluations will be published in peer-reviewed evaluations in the public domain, the first of these evaluation reports will be published in Autumn 2022 and then annually thereafter. All of the data presented, whether internal or public, will follow the publishable standard of suppression as according to the HES Analysis Guide.
Most data will be aggregated to national level or in some cases police force area level. Much of this will be annual totals, although some may be in other time periods. All of the data will be suppressed and contain the relevant caveats on interpretation, disclosure, and sharing.
Research analysis of government funded programmes with evaluations will be published using the suppressed data, to demonstrate findings and as part of evaluating value for money using public funds. It will also add to the evidence base of what works in serious violence, and the relevance of the data to assessing this. The results will be made available in the public domain through a peer-reviewed publication, and will also be promoted to policy makers internally and with other government departments, as well as other researchers. It may be used in academic and public conferences, and also with police forces and relevant parties to the police.
Monitoring data will be produced monthly internally, with more detailed analysis and reports less frequently (likely annually). Evaluations will be tied to publishing timetables set by the publishing team at the Home Office, and will be published in line with any funding requirements of evaluation set by HM Treasury, so the timelines are not pre-specified.
Processing:
Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) Admitted Patient Care (APC) data will be released to the Home Office in the form of tabulations with small numbers unsuppressed.
The dataset provided will be an ongoing supply and consists of 3 separate files as follows:
a) Bi-Annual Assault with a Sharp Object
The tabulation is the count of inpatient finished admission episodes and finished consultant episodes with a cause code of assault with a sharp object broken down geographically by Government Office Region (GOR) of residence by month, Local Authority of residence, Police Force Area of residence and by gender, age and ethnicity, for the years 2012-13 onwards.
b) Monthly Police Force Area Assault with a Sharp Object
This tabulation shows counts of inpatient finished admission episodes with a cause code of assault with a sharp object, by month and by a) Police Force Area and b) Police Force Area and age, for the years 2012-13 onwards.
c) NHS hospital admissions from across all ICD-10 Assault categories (X92-Y09), Assault by sharp object being the predominant outcome, by month, by Police Force Area and Local Authority, by age categories of all ages, under 25s, and 25+, for the years 2012-13 onwards.
Data flow: NHS Digital sends unsuppressed data (as described above) to the Serious Violence team at the Home Office. The Home Office sends this on to the University of Hull approved team for them to use in the evaluation. All of their outputs will be suppressed in line with the HES Analysis guide. The Serious Violence team at the Home Office also sends suppressed analysis and suppressed data, once combined with NHS Wales data, to other teams within the Home Office, as well as to other government departments and police forces. All outputs will be suppressed if sent outside the immediate team (listed on the access log) in line with the HES Analysis guide. The data are not being used to target individuals, just areas which are wide.
Data are to be combined with the Welsh version of the dataset, using Police Force Area and month as linking points. This does not introduce any additional categories or information about cases, as the data are aggregated. The datasets are the same format; one collected by NHS services based in England, and the other is the same for Wales. This is to ensure a holistic national understanding of serious violence across England and Wales (as crime is not devolved in the way that health is). Additional risks of identification are mitigated by also suppressing the national figures where 'all ages' are not used, as this would risk revealing the Wales low volume figures. The data are not identifiable for individuals as volumes are aggregated and anonymised, and the linking with the Wales dataset increases the volumes so reduces risk.
Only those in the Serious Violence team would have access to the data, and the list of those people would be kept on a data access log. No unsuppressed data would leave this team, and would be kept in secure folders and tagged as not for sharing outside the team, with suppression instructions to hand. No attempt will be made to re-identify individuals. All processing will be done by substantive employees of the Home Office and University of Hull as processors who are trained in data protection and confidentiality.
The Home Office will store this data on a secure server which only the serious violence team at the Home Office can access. The folders are only accessible by someone already with access granting access to new people when they join the team and access log. No data will be stored on any cloud based systems. A record of all users of the unsuppressed data has been created. This list must be maintained regularly and anyone accessing the data that is not included on the list of users will be breaching the Agreement.
The University of Hull are the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) evaluation team. They have been commissioned by the HO to evaluate the VRU funding, and so need access to the unsuppressed data as well, in order to effectively assess impact at an area level and for the age groups targeted by the funding. They will use a secure system to hold and transfer the data - data related to this project will be stored and processed exclusively within the University of Hull Data Safe Haven. The Data Safe Haven is managed by the Hull Health Trials Unit based at the University of Hull. The infrastructure is built on a Trusted Research Environment service provided by AIMES. The data will be stored and all analysis will reside in the secure AIMES data centre in Liverpool. Researchers access the environment via a secure VPN connection with 2-factor authentication. As such no data will sit on the end users machine.
Any additional aggregate data that is created using the original data that was shared in these tabulations must employ the same disclosure control methods where the output is to be used externally. Any public facing views of the shared data must employ disclosure control as in the public facing published outputs in order to ensure appropriate levels of confidentiality are maintained.