Transparency data

In his transparency and open data letter to Cabinet Ministers on 7 July 2011, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron made a commitment to make clinical audit data available from the national audits within the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme.

The Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) has been collecting data since November 2002 and has made aggregated data available in downloadable Microsoft Excel data tables from 2004 onwards publicly available in annual reports from 2007.

Data by NHS Trust for England only is now released in a different format in a single comma separated file. The audit includes information about activity (admission numbers and bed days), clinical interventions that reflect the level of care received, and mortality as an outcome. To enable comparisons between Trusts that fairly reflect how sick the patients are on admission, risk-adjusted mortality is displayed in funnel plots in the annual PICANet reports.

These data do not list information about individual patients nor do they contain any patient identifiers. Where individual cells in the file have counts of less than five, these have been changed to ‘<5’ to maintain confidentiality.