Independent Healthcare Provider Workforce Statistics - March 2022, Experimental

The collection of a workforce Minimum Data Set (wMDS) from all providers of NHS-funded care was established as part of the Workforce Information Architecture (WIA) review following the Health and Social Care Act 2012 reforms. The reforms presented an opportunity to improve data quality, as well as data coverage and completeness, to support a step change in the effectiveness of workforce planning. NHS Digital consulted with a wide range of users and stakeholders and identified the need to categorise the workforce more clearly to show where individuals are working (whether in a hospital, a GP practice, or in the independent sector).  

As part of the WIA workstream, NHS Digital has published biannual experimental statistics for the IHP Workforce in England since September 2015. The collection was paused twice (March 2020 and March 2021) to support healthcare providers during the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in September 2021 due to technical reasons. 

There are two sources of data that make up these statistics: extractions from the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) and submissions via the workforce Minimum Data Set Collection Vehicle (wMDSCV).

The information provided for the IHP Workforce does not represent the entire workforce employed across the whole of this sector and does not only show the staff providing NHS commissioned services.

The number of IHP organisations providing data and how they have provided data has changed over time, from 41 in 2015 to 69 for this collection. For further details please see Appendix 1 in the Tables file.

Data has been published at individual organisation level from March 2019 data. Whilst organisations providing data via ESR are identified against their data, currently, IHPs submitting data via wMDSCV are pseudonymised (although the same codes are used in each release, so an element of time series data is provided). 

Since the September 2019 release, organisations contributing data via wMDSCV have agreed to be listed in this publication (please see Appendix 3 in the Tables file). Going forward we are looking to provide additional detail to improve utility of these statistics and allow data providers to benchmark themselves, so will be consulting further around this soon.  It is hoped that the move towards a greater focus on individual organisations will further help to increase the accuracy for the data as those organisations are better able to understand the wider context of the data they have provided.