Publication, Part of Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE)

Patient-Led Assessments of the Care Environment (PLACE), 2023 - England

Official statistics

Publication Date:: 22 Feb 2024

DQ Report: User centred data quality measures

Trade-Offs between Output Quality Components

PLACE data are usually published within two months of receipt of completed data, taking into account extended data entry time to allow for various local issues. We have met these criteria as we closed the assessment portal on the 5^th January 2024 following extensions for exceptional circumstances, and published on the 22^nd February 2024.

Assessment of User Needs and Perceptions

We work closely with our principal stakeholders (NHS England Commercial Directorate) to ensure that data meet the needs of data users. Feedback received during the collection is used to review the collection and guidance on an annual basis. A full review of the collection was conducted following publication of the 2018 collection to ensure that the PLACE programme remains fit for purpose and continues to deliver its aims and to meet user needs.

Known users of the PLACE data include:

Department of Health

Information from the collection is used to brief Ministers, answer Parliamentary Questions, and provide responses to correspondence and to inform policy decisions around areas such as the patient environment and dementia strategy.

Care Quality Commission

Information from the collection is used in the CQC’s Intelligent Monitoring (IM) process. IM is an analysis used to inform the CQC’s new inspection programme about which trusts could be prioritised for inspection.

NHS England

Information from the collection is used for a range of purposes including:

-Informing quality improvement programmes, including the daily care environment and nutrition

-Informing compassion in practice implementation in relation to privacy and dignity -Informing patient engagement work in terms of the level of patient involvement and related processes

-Informing commissioners of best intelligence tools to guide healthcare contract decisions

Healthcare providers

-Healthcare providers use their scores to produce action plans on service improvement which are published locally.

Others

We believe other key users of the statistics will be:

-Ministers and their advisers

-Clinical Commissioning Groups

-Healthcare providers to produce action/improvement plans and for benchmarking purposes

-Students, academics and researchers

-Individual citizens to support choosing their provider of healthcare

Performance Cost and Respondent Burden

The collection exploits online technology to reduce the burden on organisations in completing and returning the data. Following a review of the 2015 process changes were made to the assessment process which, whilst they added a slight increase in data entry burden, were designed to speed up the assessment process thereby reducing overall burden.

Providers also have the option of purchasing a mobile solution with which to directly enter data agreed by the assessing team on the day, which saves a significant amount of time entering data onto the online collection system. In 2019 NHS Digital also launched a free application which connects directly with the collection system, enabling the same direct entry of data during assessments and facilitating data saving where no signal is available (for later upload).

The collection was reviewed and approved by the Data Alliance Partnership Board (DAPB) part of the Data Standards Assurance Service (DSAS).

Confidentiality, Transparency and Security

There is no person identifiable data (PID) in the PLACE collection, except for some limited detail about patient assessors, which has been removed other than counts of persons participating in each assessment.

Please see links below to relevant NHS Digital policies (current until replaced by NHS England policies following the merger):

Data:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information

Data security and information governance:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data -and -information

Freedom of Information Process:

https://digital.nhs.uk/about-nhs -digital/contact -us/freedom -of -information

Codes of practice for handling information in health and care:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and -information/looking -after -information/data -security -and information -governance/codes -of -practice -for -handling -information -in -health -and -care