Change of status from official statistics to management information
Following a review of the criteria for Official Statistics, it has been agreed with the Chief Statistician of NHS Digital that the INLIQ publication no longer meets all of these requirements and as such will be published as management information (MI) from 1 October 2021 onwards. The INLIQ review page provides more information.
1 October 2021 00:00 AM
Indicators no longer in QOF (INLIQ) review
Summary
Following discussions in September 2021, NHS Digital undertook a review of the INLIQ publication.
In summary, the review looked at:
- the format of the INLIQ publication
-
whether the INLIQ publication meets the criteria for official statistics status
Outcomes
Format
INLIQ will continue to be published annually as part of the GP contract services publication. The data are currently published in both CSV and xls format however the same information is available in both. It has been agreed with stakeholders that NHS Digital will only publish the CSV file of the data going forwards.
Status
INLIQ was assessed against the following criteria and the outcomes are detailed below.
| Criteria | Review outcome | Comments |
| The organisation that produced the statistics is within a Crown body or named on an Official Statistics Order and so the numbers that they produce are within the scope of the Statistics Act. | Met | |
| The statistics are put in the public domain through a regular output or adhoc release. | Met | INLIQ is published once a year |
| The data are used publicly in support of major decisions on policy, resource allocation or other topics of public interest. | Met |
Stakeholders including the Department of Health and Public Health England have indicated that the information linked to these indicators is essential for their work and wider healthcare programmes. Not all the indicators that are no longer in QOF will continue to be extracted, only those where it's felt that continued data would be useful. |
| Public interest: the data have a high public profile, attract controversy or debate when published and / or public debate would be better informed if they were classified as official statistics. | Met | Usage statistics of the INLIQ data are very low compared to other GP contract services. |
| Methods used: the data are collected and results compiled using widely accepted statistical methods that are appropriate for the intended use. | Met | Data are collected via the GP Extraction Service (GPES) and processed using SAS EG / python. |
| Independence: The data were produced by appropriately skilled analysts who are free from conflicts of interest, including political and commercial pressures. | Met | Yes |
| Quality: Data inputs and statistical outputs are of sufficient quality to support the intended uses. | Partially met |
As the indicators in this publication are no longer part of QOF it is possible that coding standards in patient records for the various conditions/patient factors in this collection are no longer of the same quality. Limited data quality checking is carried out on this data. |
| Representative: The statistics are broadly representative of the population that they are designed to measure. Please refer to the guidance document for more detailed information. | Met | The GPES extracts data from the entire registered GP population and business rules are written by trained staff. |
As per the review above, the INLIQ publication does not fully meet the criteria for official statistics and it has therefore been agreed with the Chief Statistician to downgrade INLIQ from Official statistics status to Management Information (MI) status going forwards, in line with the other GP contract services.
Last edited: 4 January 2023 3:05 pm