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National Diabetes Audit data collection - England

Summary

Why and how we process your data in the National Diabetes Audit (England) and your rights.

Controller NHS England
How we use the information (processing activities)

The National Diabetes Audit (NDA) helps improve the quality of diabetes care by enabling participating NHS services and organisations to:

  • assess local practice against National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines
  • compare their care and outcomes with similar services and organisations
  • identify gaps or shortfalls that are priorities for improvement
  • identify and share best practice
  • provide comprehensive national pictures of diabetes care and outcomes in England

The NDA collects information about patients who receive diabetes care in England. 

For more information on the data we collect for the National Diabetes Audit in Wales, see the National Diabetes Audit (Wales) Transparency Notice.

We collect the following information:

Personal data

  • NHS number
  • date of birth
  • postcode (NDA Core collection only)

Special category data

  • ethnicity
  • diabetes type
  • Body Mass Index (BMI)
  • blood pressure
  • smoking status

We then link this data to other datasets that NHS England holds. Data linkage allows us to understand the types of complications people with diabetes can experience and gives a better picture of diabetes care whilst reducing the burden placed on NHS services who submit the data to NHS England so that they do not have to submit the same data twice.

More information on data collected for the purposes of the NDA is available. 

A more detailed Transparency Notice for the NDA is also available on the NDA collection page. 
Does this contain sensitive (special category) data such as health information? Yes
Who are recipients of this data?

Data is shared or is expected to be shared with organisations such as healthcare providers, clinicians, and commissioners of NHS services, for example:

  • the organisation that provided your care: to assess the effectiveness of your care and to improve the services they offer 
  • the Department of Health and Social Care: to inform policy and guidelines  
  • organisations responsible for the commissioning of NHS services in England, such as Integrated Care Boards, to plan and improve diabetes services and for benchmarking 
  • local authorities: to help plan and improve diabetes services 
  • research organisations, including universities and charities: to carry out research 

Organisations must apply and gain approval through NHS England’s Data Access Request Service to access NDA data.

Is data transferred outside the UK? No
How long the data is kept 8 years with regular reviews in accordance with the NHS Records Management Code of Practice and our Records Management Policy.
Our lawful basis for holding this data Legal obligation
Your rights
  • Tick Be informed
  • Tick Get access to it
  • Tick Rectify or change it
  • Cross Erase or remove it
  • Tick Restrict or stop processing it
  • Cross Move, copy or transfer it
  • Cross Object to it being processed or used
  • Cross Know if a decision was made by a computer rather than a person
How can you withdraw your consent?

Consent is not the basis for processing.
Is the data subject to decisions made solely by computers? (automated decision making) No
Where does this data come from? For the NDA programme collections, we collect data from healthcare providers such as: GP practices (if they have chosen to participate in the audit); specialist diabetes out-patient services; specialist monogenic diabetes services in community; health services in prisons (adult and young offender) providing diabetes care; maternity units with a joint diabetes and maternity service within NHS Trusts; diabetes footcare services within NHS trusts; NHS acute care providers We also link to other data NHS England holds, such as the Maternity Services Dataset for the purposes of the National Gestational Diabetes Audit
The legal basis for collecting this data

Legal obligation - Article 6(1)(c) of UK GDPR.  This is because the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has issued NHS England with a Direction under section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to collect and analyse National Diabetes Audit data. This is called the National Diabetes Audit Directions 2017.

We also need an additional legal basis in the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) to use data which is extra sensitive. This is known as ‘special categories of personal data’. Our legal bases to use data relating to your health for the purposes of the NDA are:

  • Health or social care – Article 9(2)(h) of UK GDPR, plus Schedule 1, Part 1, Paragraph 2 “Health or social care purposes” of DPA 2018