Assuring Transformation

Purposes for processing

NHS England uses Assuring Transformation Data to check that people with a learning disability, autism or both are getting the right care in the right place. Please see our Assuring transformation data web page and What is assuring transformation for more information about how we do this.

NHS Digital publishes a monthly progress report. This lets the public check if the NHS is doing a good job of looking after people with a learning disability, autism or both who are in hospital. The progress reports don’t have any personal information, like names, birthdays or NHS numbers.

Sources of the data

Commissioners of health services (the people who plan and pay for services) collect the data in the first place from the hospitals that are treating these patients. The commissioners are NHS England, Lead Providers in Provider Collaboratives acting on behalf of NHS England and Clinical Commissioning Groups across the country. Every month NHS Digital collects the information from the commissioners and gives it to NHS England, who is responsible for the collection.

Categories of personal data

The data received by NHS England includes a record for each patient with their name, NHS Number and other personal details, and information about their stay in hospital.

Categories of recipients

The information is used by the Learning Disability Programme within NHS England to derive performance and quality indicators for Learning Disability services, in order to drive improvements in the services and to identify where good/poor practice is taking place.

Legal basis for processing

For GDPR purposes NHS England’s lawful basis for processing is 6(1)(e) ‘…exercise of official authority…’. For special categories (health) data the basis is 9(2)(h) ‘…health or social care…’.

NHS England has obtained section 251 support (approval under the Health Service (Control of Patient Information) Regulations 2002) to collect Assuring Transformation data from providers of specialised mental health services, and to receive the Assuring Transformation Dataset from NHS Digital.