NHS Digital publishes new data on healthcare activity and outcomes for shielded patients

A new aggregate data set that provides information on healthcare activity and outcomes of shielded patients has been published by NHS Digital today.

The Tracking Healthcare Activity and Outcomes for Shielded Patients report provides a breakdown of the number of emergency hospital admissions, deaths and positive COVID-19 test results – for a subset of patients who have been identified as being on the Shielded Patient List (SPL) in England.

A similar aggregate data set relating to a sample of the general population has also been published to allow a comparison between the two cohorts.

This work does not evaluate the impact of shielding or identify reasons for changes in behavior as it is not possible to reliably estimate what the emergency admission and mortality rates would have been if shielding had not been implemented. The report describes trends in activity, mortality and positive COVID-19 test results for the subset of patients on the SPL.

All of the data in this new data set is at national level with no regional breakdowns.

The data has been collected from a number of sources including, but not limited to: the SPL, Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), Office for National Statistics (ONS) death registrations data, Personal Demographics Service (PDS) data and Public Health England’s Second Generation Surveillance System (SGSS) lab results.

NHS Digital last week also enhanced its weekly anonymous Coronavirus Shielded Patient List Open Data Set dashboard to include a breakdown by disease group.

Where patients are identified nationally as being at high risk of complications from COVID-19 they are assigned a disease group that corresponds to the categories set by the Chief Medical Officer for England.

The current open data set and dashboard, which includes CCG and local authority data and can be broken down by age and gender, has been enhanced to include a breakdown by disease group.