Health and Growth Accelerator Programme national evaluation

In line with our 10 Year Health Plan, NHS England is spearheading new initiatives to reduce health-driven economic inequality. As part of this, NHS England has initiated the Health and Growth Accelerator (HGA) Programme to test the effectiveness of health interventions in supporting people back into work or keeping them in work. This work is starting in 3 integrated care boards (ICBs). Read more about the HGA Programme.

The ICBs have identified their local needs and have commissioned local services to provide specific health and care interventions to help people get back into employment or stay in employment when they are at risk of leaving by supporting with their health needs. NHS England’s role as part of the HGA Programme is undertaking a national service evaluation to understand the effectiveness of investment in these initiatives.

This privacy notice provides information about the national service evaluation we are undertaking in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to see how these new interventions are performing, and what we can do better in our role as the national healthcare commissioner to support national economic growth.

How we obtain your personal data

We get your personal data from the health and care organisations that provide HGA Programme interventions to you. This happens as a result of our official role as the safe haven for patient data in England. Read more about our role in health and care, and why we collect personal information from medical records. Those pages contain important information on your choices about your confidential personal data.

Purposes for which we process your data

We will use your personal data to provide a robust service evaluation of the HGA Programme.

Service evaluations help us understand why and how an outcome has been achieved, especially in areas of complex service development or without an existing evidence base. These evaluations can cover:

  • whether a service is working or has worked as we expected it to
  • the costs and benefits of a service
  • the experience of a service by users
  • impacts on health inequalities
  • staff experience of providing the service
  • whether there were significant unexpected consequences
  • how the service was implemented and, if changes were made, the reasons behind those changes

For this evaluation specifically, your personal data is used for 2 main reasons:

  • to support our learning: we want to understand whether the HGA Programme is working as intended. The learning from this evaluation will also show us which parts of the programme are successful and unsuccessful, so we can understand what need to be changed to improve these services’ performance
  • to support accountability: the HGA Programme is funded publicly, so it is essential that it is known whether it is achieving its intended outcomes. We are responsible for spending public funds responsibly to maximise value and outcomes achieved with our taxpayers’ money

The controller of your personal data

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), NHS England and ONS are joint controllers of your personal data where we process it for the purposes of this evaluation. NHS England’s legal basis is set out below:

Article 6 condition in the UK GDPR

We process your data under Article 6(1)(e), as it is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the exercise of official authority vested in NHS England. This task has to be set out in UK domestic law.

Compliance with an Article 9 condition in the UK GDPR

As the data used includes special category data, we must meet an Article 9(2) condition. In processing this data, we meet Article 9(2)(h), which means the processing is necessary for the purposes of preventive medicine, the provision of health or social care or treatment or the management of health or social care systems and services, as further detailed in UK law.

Compliance with the common law duty of confidence (CLDC)

Section 45A(11)(a) Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 allows NHS England to legally share confidential information with ONS.

Types of personal data we process

For the purposes of this evaluation, these are the types of personal data we use that are received from the health and care providers providing interventions under the HGA Programme:

  • NHS number
  • whether you have been referred to an intervention and when
  • what type of intervention you have been referred to
  • whether you started the intervention and when
  • whether you completed the intervention and when
  • EQ-5D-5L at the start and the end of the intervention. EQ-5D-5L is a health-related quality of life measure you will have completed during your interactions with your providers; this helps us understand if the service changes improve your overall health.

For the purposes of this evaluation, these are the types of personal data ONS will provide from their administrative data set that they receive from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and Census 2021:

  • age
  • sex
  • ethnicity
  • lower-layer super output area (LSOA)
  • employment status and monthly pay at the time you started an intervention and when this information was collected
  • employment status and monthly pay at the time you completed an intervention and when this information was collected

How we process your data

We use your personal data in the following ways:

  • the organisation that has provided you with a service under the HGA Programme will send your personal data to NHS England. This is so that our data services for commissioners regional offices (DSCROs) can perform their functions to support your ICB with their local commissioning needs
  • NHS England will then send the types of personal data listed above to the ONS. This is so that they can link your data with the data they already hold, anonymise this data, and make it accessible to our NHS England analysts to carry out this evaluation. ONS will not make this available to anyone else other than NHS England analysts
  • we will then undertake our analysis to see if our new services are working effectively, and see which ones are performing the best so that we can decide whether they should be rolled out nationally

Sharing your data

For the purposes of this evaluation, we will share your personal data with ONS:

Office for National Statistics (ONS)

ONS is responsible for collecting and publishing statistics related to the economy, population and society at national, regional, and local levels. As a result, they hold a large amount of data on individuals, including health information.

We worked with ONS to design this evaluation. NHS England and ONS are joint controllers of your personal data under UK GDPR for the purposes of this evaluation. ONS will use your NHS number to link the types of data as listed under “types of personal data we process”. This minimises the amount of data that needs to be collected directly from you. NHS England and ONS have an agreement in place setting out our respective responsibilities for this evaluation. We share your personal data listed in this privacy notice with ONS, who will only be using it for the purposes of this evaluation. ONS will not be sharing your personal data with anyone other than NHS England’s analysts.

How long we keep your personal data for

You can obtain a copy of our Corporate records retention and disposal schedule and Primary care services retention schedule, or by contacting our Customer Contact Centre. We also comply with the Records management code of practice.

ONS have obligations to keep it for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which we have shared your personal data. Information about this will be provided in their transparency or privacy notices which are published on the relevant ONS webpage.

Where we store the data

We store and process your personal data within the United Kingdom but where our processors need to process your personal data outside of the United Kingdom, we will always ensure that the transfer outside of the United Kingdom complies with data protection laws.

Your rights over your personal data

To read more about the information we collect, our legal basis for collecting this information, and what choices and rights you have, see how we look after your health and care information.

As NHS England has now merged with NHS Digital and Health Education England, additional transparency information about the data we are now the controller for can be found at: