About the All Age Continuing Care Data Set

The NHS England All Age Continuing Care (AACC) programme covers the following forms of continuing care for adults, children and young people. 

For adults, the AACC programme covers the following forms of continuing care:

• NHS Continuing Healthcare (CHC)
• NHS-funded Nursing Care (FNC)
• Joint Funded Individual packages of care (JF)

For children and young people, the AACC programme covers the following forms of continuing care:

• Children and Young People's continuing care (CYP)

The AACC vision is for individuals and families to have improved experience, transparency and fairness across all forms of continuing care including a smooth transition between services and resource provision.

All Age Continuing Care (AACC) is an umbrella term covering different types of continuing care however the policy frameworks for children and young people and adults are distinct and separate.

Both joint funded individual packages of care and children and young people's continuing care have seen significant spend increases in recent years. Personal health budget packages, an important aspect of personalisation, is also relevant to both joint funded individual packages of care and children and young people's continuing care. 

Unlike adult NHS continuing healthcare (CHC) and NHS-funded nursing care, which have had long standing data collections, no corresponding activity data has been available for Joint funded individual packages of care or children and young people's continuing care.

While  policies and even legislation may be separate for children and young people's continuing care, delivery of these services is often from the same teams.

Joint  funded individual packages of care is an additional funding type to fall out of the CHC assessment process (along with NHS funded nursing care) but for which there is a gap in data.

One of the aims and aspirations of the AACC data set is to, therefore, expand the scope to also include children and young people's continuing care and  joint funded individual packages of care.

As a secondary uses data set, the AACC data set intends to re-use operational data for purposes other than direct patient care. It defines the data items, definitions and associated value sets extracted or derived from information systems and sent to NHS England for analysis purposes.

The AACC information captured within the data set supports the national aims to deliver better:

• outcomes
• experience
• use of resources, by providing detailed evidence that is currently unavailable across all CHC commissioned service areas

The AACC data set will demonstrate:

• how long patients are waiting for their package of care
• where care packages are being changed frequently
• other evidence which may indicate poor outcomes for the patient, allowing this to be identified and addressed

The data set will allow the end-to-end monitoring of all AACC commissioned service areas from an initial referral/notification all the way through to a review.

The AACC data set should be implemented by all Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) commissioning NHS-funded AACC services in England in accordance with dates detailed in the information standard implementation guidance. All responsible commissioners must be able to collect the information as defined in the Technical Output Specification.

The implementation of this data set equally impacts all NHS-funded AACC IT system suppliers.

Further information about the AACC implementation tools and guidance is available.