DAPB3107: Ambulance Data Set

The Ambulance Data Set (ADS) is a patient-level data set whose purpose is to process robust, comprehensive, nationally consistent, and comparable person-based data on urgent and emergency care activity.

Information about how patients access ambulance services, and the care and treatment that they receive, has historically been collected by all ambulance services as individual standalone data sets. The way this information was collected, reported, and analysed varied, making it time consuming and difficult to look at specific aspects of the patient journey. The NHS Long Term Plan set out a commitment to develop an ambulance data set to “…bring together data from all ambulance services nationally in order to follow and understand patient journeys from the ambulance service into other urgent and emergency healthcare settings”.

The ADS will combine data from Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems to achieve the following objectives:

• Create an accessible data warehouse to inform national clinical and operational policy
• Provide a single consistent and comparable data set for benchmarking
• Reduce the informatic burden on ambulance services by replacing the multiple requests that ambulance services currently receive
• Provide services with linked data from other supporting data sets starting with Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) to provide better information about the patient journey and benefit paramedics by providing learning about clinical outcomes.

This information standard is published under section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. An Information Standards Notice (see below) provides an overview of scope and implementation timescales, and the requirements specification provides further detail for those who have to implement the information standard.