Submissions and patient cohorts

Acute trusts will be required to submit data one month in arrears, on the 15th working day of the month. 

Data should be collated in the template provided and submitted to NHS England, via the Strategic Data Collection Service (SDCS). It will then be sent to Arden and Gem CSU for processing.

Where there are multiple funded ACT sites within one trust only one return should be submitted per trust. It is local preference if the data is submitted straight from trusts or by the ICB. If submitted by the ICB, we would need a trust identifier, but it is not necessary for it to come from the ICB. Trust and hospital site codes should be input in the relevant section of the submission template, and data should be submitted once during each reporting period.

It is only mandatory for sites in receipt of targeted NHS England funding for an ACT to report data. However, any other trusts that have ACTs are encouraged to register with SCDS and submit data on a voluntary basis.

The programme is primarily focussed on adult services and specifically targets individuals aged 16 years or older. Although data for patients under 16 years should not be reported in this submission, it is expected that age-appropriate treatments should still be offered to them even if this falls in a paediatric service. Sites should aim to ascertain the alcohol risk status of all patients through comprehensive alcohol health risk assessment. 

Formal consent will not be required as use of the data is covered by the same rules as other Secondary Uses Data. Secondary use of data in the NHS is when patient data is not used for direct care but for other secondary purposes such as commissioning, risk stratification, financial and national clinical audit, healthcare management and planning, research and public health surveillance. Once the patients’ data are submitted to the Data Services for Commissioners Regional Office (Arden and Gem CSU), pseudonymisation occurs and all identifiable information will be stripped out of the dataset (similar to SUS data). At this point, the resultant dataset will be shared with NHS England.

The characteristics of patient cohorts for this data collection are specified below.

Aggregate metrics

During each reporting period, each trust should provide aggregate counts for all patients admitted or attending the hospital who have a recorded alcohol dependence assessment 

• possible (upon initial assessment), 
• positive (once seen by an ACT) 
• negative for alcohol dependence
• those with no alcohol assessment recorded

Separate counts are required for inpatient, outpatient and emergency care settings. In each setting, it is a count of patients who have a "current" assessment (that is, during their current contact with the trust). It is not a count of those actually being assessed whilst they are in that setting (for example, the inpatient count of those assessed would include those assessed in emergency care before being admitted).

For inpatients only “ordinary admissions” should be included in the inpatient aggregate section (all inpatients who are referred are included in the individual level section). See the Data guidance section for a full definition. Trusts should provide this information separately for each hospital site with an ACT. These are all recorded on the aggregate section (tab) of the overall Trust level submission template.

Individual level metrics

Individual-level data should be reported for all patients who have been referred to Alcohol Care Teams, once they have been discharged (from hospital) during the reporting period or when they leave the hospital after attending an emergency care department or for referrals from outpatients once they have been discharged from the ACT. These patients will invariably have an initial assessment score indicating possible alcohol dependence and will subsequently be confirmed as positive for alcohol dependence following a clinical assessment by the ACT.

Recording multiple admissions

There should only be one NHS number for each patient record, and each patient should only appear once per submission window unless they have been re-referred to the service during a separate episode of care.