What is Data Quality?

Information is a vital Trust asset, both for the clinical management of individual patient's and efficient management of services and resources.

Keeping good quality information about our patients is crucial to us achieving the Trust's objectives of delivering the best possible care to our patients.

Data is considered to be of high quality if it is:
Accurate
Up to date
Comprehensive
Appropriate
Valid
Available when needed
Easily read and understood

A fundamental principle of data quality is that data should be right first time, which means that the responsibility for getting the data right is at the point at which it is recorded, for example, if you attend an outpatient appointment you should make sure that your personal details are checked at every visit.  If any of your personal details change, please inform the Trust as soon as possible.

Recording of Ethnic Origin

All NHS organisations are mandated to collect information regarding the ethnic origin of its patients and staff.  This data will be collected when you attend an outpatient appointment, come into hospital as an inpatient or attend Accident and Emergency. 

Why do we need to collect this information?

We are required to collect this data in order to:

Demonstrate that we are compliant with the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 which places a statutory duty on NHS organisations, such as the Trust to promote race equality
Support the allocation of resources and develop policies relating to equality issues
Highlight any inequalities and investigate why this is happening and remove any unfairness of disadvantage
Identify those who need our services - some groups of people are more at risk of specific diseases and some have specific care needs so ethnic group data can help treat patients and support the Trust by alerting staff to groups who may need our services
Improve public health by making sure that services are reaching local communities and are delivering services fairly to everyone who needs them
Ensure that under-represented groups receive services that are relevant to their needs and provided fairly

What do we need to do?
When you come into hospital as either an inpatient, outpatient or attendee at Accident and Emergency, reception staff will ask your demographic details, for example, your name, address (including postcode) and date of birth and also what your ethnic origin is - this may be asked for verbally or they may ask you to complete a form with this question asked. 

We do understand however that there might be occasions when patients will not be able to give us this information, for example, patients who due to their illness are not able to understand or be understood and when a patient is unconscious.

We must also collect ethnic origin for new babies born at the Trust and the parent or guardian will be asked to inform us.

Click here to view the "Collecting Information About Ethnicity" leaflet.