Quality assurance

Following a review by the UK Statistics Authority, the statistics published in the Guardianship publication are designated as National Statistics. To maintain this designation, we need to meet certain requirements. One of the current requirements is to demonstrate its awareness of the risks that are posed by the data sources to the quality of the Guardianship publication.

To meet this requirement we would be grateful if you would use the text area in the Sign Off Sheet worksheet of the data template to provide details of the quality assurance and audit arrangements you have in place for the data used in the Guardianship return. This may cover areas such as how the data are gathered, stored, managed, shared, reused, identified and extracted or how risks to the data are identified, such as how misuse, data loss or irretrievability are managed.

This will help improve our knowledge about data collection and operational issues that may affect the quality/accuracy of the submitted data, in line with UK Statistics Authority recommendations.

View the UK Statistics Authority assessment report:

Statistics on Guardianship Under the Mental Health Act, 1983 – Office for Statistics Regulation (statisticsauthority.gov.uk)
(Assessment report number 295).

Responses in previous years can be found in Appendix C of the 2015-16 Guardianship report.