Publication, Part of Estates Returns Information Collection
Estates Returns Information Collection, Summary page and dataset for ERIC 2022/23
Official statistics, Other reports and statistics
DQ Report: Coherence and Comparability
Overview
The ERIC collection is mandatory for all NHS secondary care providers including Ambulance Trusts. It is the only source of data on these elements of the NHS Estate in England.
As part of the Lord Carter Efficiency work a lot of feedback was received regarding the quality of ERIC data in 2014/15, highlighting some areas where data had not necessarily matched the ERIC definitions. As a result, NHS Digital and NHS England have been working with Trusts and stakeholders to improve data quality in ERIC since then and some of the changes over time may therefore be a result of data quality improvements at all levels.
Private Finance Initiative (PFI) information was introduced for 2014/15; a revision was made to the PFI collection in 2015/16 to reflect feedback from the NHS as part of the Lord Carter Efficiency work.
In late 2019 a working group representing all the Ambulance trusts requested changes to their collection to enable better benchmarking of their sites. The changes to the reporting criteria and question set were formulated by this group and despite the additional burden all trusts agreed to the new collection criteria and question set that the working group had proposed. The changes to the collection were:
- An individual return for all sites over 999m2
- Sites under 1,000m2 to be reported under Other Reportable Sites
- A breakdown of the areas by functions for all sites specific to ambulance trusts.
Further work on this programme of improvements to ensure ERIC remains relevant and fit for purpose across all types of secondary care providers continues.
Changes to the ERIC collection over time
The ERIC return has existed in its current format since 2001. However, the precise data has changed over time due to the ever-changing landscape of the NHS and has led to a combination of:
- Regular alterations to data fields and/or definitions
- Annual addition of new data fields
- Regular removal (and occasionally subsequent reintroduction) of data fields
- Regular changes to the level at which data are collected i.e., between Trust and site level
- Changes in the status of the collection e.g., for a period not all relevant fields were mandatory for NHS Foundation Trusts
The combined effect of these changes in many cases limits and constrains the ability to undertake long-term analysis or compare trends in data fields due to inconsistent or unavailable data. For more information, please see our website where full definition sets can be downloaded for each collection:
Estates Return Information Collection
Data quality work conducted after the 2016/17 publication highlighted many areas where the quality of returned information was poor. One of the principal causes of this was substantial changes to definitions over time, which has meant that figures have been inconsistently calculated by data providers. Whilst NHS Digital worked in partnership with the collection sponsors (NHS England) to standardise ERIC definitions (minimising changes) and to extensively quality assure the data, it was felt that the subsequent datasets should still not be compared with those from previous reporting years. As work has continued from 2021/22 onwards to stabilise the definitions, we have introduced additional comparison metrics with previous reporting years, but we still encourage data users to only perform comparative analysis with considerable caution, and to take any footnotes on data tables into account.
Many metrics are broadly comparable across reporting years, but where a metric is labelled as ‘experimental’ (either because it is relatively new, or because there have been significant changes to the definition) we ask data users not to make time series comparisons or draw any conclusions from published values at this time.
From 2020/21 it should be noted that costs, capital, and revenue related to COVID-19 incurred during the reporting year were not included if they were allocated to a specific trust wide COVID-19 budget, with any additional costs in pay and non-pay budgets being reported under the relevant metrics. For 2021/22 we amended this slightly, asking trusts to remove costs, consumptions, volumes, Whole Time Equivalent staff counts etc. that could easily be identified from specific metrics. We also asked them to exclude any external areas used for testing, vaccination and to house temporary facilities specifically for COVID-19 management from their returns. This remains the case for 2022/23.
Fields with minor clarifications - 2022/23
Further refinements/clarifications to several other fields have been made; please see the data definitions document that accompanies this release:
For comparison of definitions, the data definitions document for the 2021/22 ERIC collection can be accessed here:
Last edited: 20 November 2024 2:09 pm