Health and Care of People with Learning Disabilities Experimental Statistics 2020 to 2021

The outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) has led to unprecedented changes in the work and behaviour of GP practices and consequently the data in this publication may have been impacted, including indicators and contextual data from patients registered at a GP Practice.

The data is extracted through the General Practice Extraction Service (GPES). Therefore, the burden of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has not affected the collection of data for this publication.

Caution should be taken in drawing any conclusions from this data without due consideration of the circumstances both locally and nationally as of 1 January 2020 and NHS Digital would recommend that any use of this data is accompanied by an appropriate caveat.

Experimental Statistics are series of statistics that are in the testing phase and not yet fully developed for several reasons such as:

• Poor coverage
• Poor data quality
• Data is undergoing evaluation

Customers should be aware of the status and constraints of this data. The limitations of each measure are explained in the accompanying information in the publication.

This publication is classified as experimental statistics due to limitations in practice coverage. The publication includes data from participating practices using EMIS, Cegedim Healthcare Systems (formerly Vision) and EVA Health Technologies (formerly Microtest) GP systems. No data has been provided by TPP which accounts for around 40% of practices.

More information on experimental statistics can be found in:

ONS Guide to Experimental Statistics

GSS Guidance on Experimental statistics

NHS Digital regularly solicit feedback from users of its publications to inform future development. Feedback can be provided using this consultation form. 

This publication aims to highlight health inequalities that could lead to the difference in mortality rate and health outcomes between those individuals with a learning disability and those without.

The main stakeholders are Public Health England, NHS England and Improvement and The Department of Health and Social Care.  NHS Digital have worked closely with all three to ensure the data collected and presented in this publication is the most useful and appropriate for policy makers and commissioners.  We also work closely with several charities and academics to ensure the contents of the publication meet the needs of as many users as possible. 

System suppliers play an important role, translating the specifications into code for their systems and managing the submission of queries to practice systems and collecting responses. Data is only collected from practices using EMIS, and Cegedim Healthcare Systems.  No data is collected from practices using TPP.  This causes a gap as practices using TPP account for approximately 40% of practices.

Practice participation in this collection is voluntary, meaning practices must participate to give consent for data to be collected. The total national coverage for this publication each year is approximately 50%. Details of exact participation can be found in each year specific publication.

Data quality is generally considered to be very good for all GPES extracts.  The data that is collected is 100% complete due to it being an automated extract.

CCG patient coverage for each year is provided as a csv in the publication. There are a number of CCGs who have a patient coverage greater than 100%. This is due to the denominator being sourced from a different dataset (patients registered at a GP Practice) as it is not available in the data collected for this publication. In addition, data for earlier years is remapped to current CCGs to make the dataset more usable for comparative purposes. The percentage of participating CCGs with a coverage greater than 100% is shown in the table below.

Table 1: Percentage of participating CCGs with patient coverage over 100%

Data from the previous financial year (e.g. 1st April 2020 to 31st March 2021) is extracted from GP practice systems via GPES each year, with the exception of 2019-20 when five years worth of data was extracted due to a change in indicators (see Coherence and Comparability for more details) . The extraction period lasts approximately 10-14 days and is usually in September. NHS Digital aim to begin analysis in October and publish in December of the following year.

In 2020-21

• Palliative care indicators LDOB071 has been superseded by LDOB111 and LDOB072 has been superseded by LDOB112 and are not comparable due to a change in the definition.
• Colorectal cancer screening indicators LDOB023 has been superseded by LDOB113 and LDOB024 has been superseded by LDOB114 and are not comparable due to a change in the definition.

Eighteen new indicators were introduced LDOB093; LDOB094; LDOB095; LDOB096; LDOB097; LDOB098; LDOB099; LDOB100; LDOB101; LDOB102; LDOB103; LDOB104; LDOB105; LDOB106; LDOB107; LDOB108; LDOB109; LDOB110. Fourteen of which relate to people with autism.

More information on the indicators can be found in the Business Rules.