Urgent Community Response

Urgent Community Response (UCR) services provide timely, community-based assessment and intervention to people in their homes when their health or wellbeing deteriorates.

UCR services aim to prevent avoidable hospital admissions and improve access to care closer to home in support of the 10 Year Health Plan, Medium Term Planning Framework and Neighbourhood Health Framework,

Planning expectations focus on delivering more care in the community, equitable access, consistent delivery, and timely response, including reaching at least 70% of patients within the two-hour target where clinically appropriate.

As of April 2026, the publication has been expanded to include all UCR referrals (2hr and non-2hr) and a new measure on the standardised rate of referral per 100k population. 

Background

The urgent community response (UCR) monthly key performance indicators are focused on the delivery of UCR services in England. The data is collected through the community services dataset (CSDS). 

The indicators include: 

  • The percentage of 2-hour UCR referrals that achieved the 2-hour standard in the reporting month
  • The standardised rate of All UCR referrals (2hr and non-2hr) per 100k population
  • The number of UCR referrals that were received in the reporting month (both All UCR referrals and 2hr only)
  • The number of UCR contacts that were delivered in the reporting month (both All UCR referrals and 2hr only)

Data is shown nationally and across different geographies; NHS commissioning region, integrated care board (ICB) and provider. 

The indicators are constructed using community services dataset (CSDS) data, and follow the principles set out in the UCR Technical Data Guidance.

The latest month of data is taken from provisional (primary) CSDS data and previous months are taken from final (refresh) CSDS data. Provisional CSDS data is used for reasons of timeliness, and final CSDS data is used for reasons of data quality, therefore the latest month of data should be used with caution. 

Data

The publication includes one sheet per key performance indicator and data is presented by organisation (in rows) and by month (in columns). Organisations included are national, NHS commissioning region, ICB and provider. A new column of monthly data will be added in each monthly publication. 

Each month the latest month of provisional (primary) CSDS data will be added and previous months’ data will be overwritten with final (refresh) CSDS data. This ensures data can be made available in a timely manner. There will be changes in performance and activity levels between publication of primary and refresh data, therefore, caution is advised in the use or analysis of provisional data. Final data, as the most comprehensive and accurate version of the data, should be used. 

If an organisation has not submitted any data relevant to any of the three tables, they will not be listed in the publication.

In order to prevent disclosure of identities or information about service users, all figures for all organisations are rounded to the nearest 5. All figures between 1 and 7 are rounded to 5.

Monthly publication

Pre-release access list

Notes

April 2026: From 1 April 2026, 12 ICB codes were legally closed and replaced by 6 new ICB codes. These changes are reflected in the April 2026 provisional data included in this publication and may affect comparability with data reported for earlier periods.

January 2026: In the January 2026 data there has been an increase in UCR referrals with ICB unknown. This is the result of an increase in submitted records where the patient postcode or GP address was not known, and it is therefore not possible to allocate an ICB for these records. Total numbers at national and Provider level are not affected. Providers will be reminded to complete postcode records as fully as possible in their future CSDS submissions.

April 2025: As of April 2025 data, a change has been made for UCR referral counts to fix a small overcount caused by some referrals submitted over multiple months. Only referrals submitted in the reporting period with a referral date within the reporting period are now included. This has reduced the number of referrals by around 0.5% compared to the previous publication and has been retrospectively applied to all months to preserve a consistent timeseries. Counts of care contacts have not been affected.

February 2025: As of February 2025 data, a change to the inclusion criteria for UCR referrals has been applied in that they no longer require a linked care contact unless being assessed for 2hr achievement. Referral counts are now higher than in previous editions of this publication. This change has been retrospectively applied to all months in order to preserve a consistent timeseries. Counts of care contacts have not been affected.

March 2023: New technical guidance was published in March 2023 and has been applied to data covering April 2023 onwards. The main change affecting the data is the expansion of the definition to include any services (such as GP-out-of-hours or district nursing services) that are not part of an urgent community response service but deliver care that meets the requirements of a two-hour urgent community response. Therefore, data before and after April 2023 is not comparable and it is not possible to perform trend analysis across these data points.

Guidance

Related statistics

Contact details

For further information about the published statistics, please contact us at:

Community Analysis Team
NHS England
england.communityanalysis@nhs.net