COVID-19 and the production of statistics

Due to the coronavirus illness (COVID-19) and the need to release capacity across the NHS to support the response, NHS England and NHS Improvement paused the collection and publication of some of our official statistics.

Initially this applied to the statistics listed in Section 5, for data due to be submitted between 1 April and 30 June. This was subsequently extended to apply to data due to be submitted between 1 July and 31 March. The list of data collections to be paused was updated for Quarter 1 2021/22, and again in September 2021 when the following changes were made:

  • Mixed Sex Accommodation (MSA) to restart from the collection of October 2021 data
  • Quarterly Monitoring of Cancelled Operations (QMCO) to restart from the collection of Quarter 3 2021/22 data.

NHS England and NHS Improvement will keep the paused collections under review to establish at which point further collections should be reinstated and update published information when the status of any of the collections change.

The document below outlines which collections continue to be paused, which have been reinstated having been paused previously and which have been permanently stopped.  The dates on which those statistics would have been released are also shown in the note.  This decision to pause some collections is informed by the Office for Statistics Regulation’s guidance on changes to statistical outputs during the coronavirus outbreak. If you have any comments or questions, please contact us.

COVID-19 and the production of statistics 2021 09 07 (PDF, 221K)