2-hour Urgent Community Response

Urgent community response services are a commitment in the NHS Long Term Plan to provide urgent care to people in their homes if their health or wellbeing suddenly deteriorates. Under the NHS planning guidance for 2022/23, UCR providers need to scale up and ensure consistency of service to reach at least 70% of patients referred to them within two hours by December 2022. 

Background

The 2-hour 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 number of 2-hour UCR referrals in scope of the 2-hour standard that were received in the reporting month
  • The number of all 2-hour UCR contacts that were delivered in the reporting month

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. These statistics are classified as experimental and should be used with caution. Experimental statistics are new official statistics undergoing evaluation. More information about experimental statistics can be found on the UK Statistics Authority website. 

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. 

As the publication uses CSDS data, these statistics are classified as experimental and should be used with caution. Experimental statistics are new official statistics undergoing evaluation. More information about experimental statistics can be found on the UK Statistics Authority website.

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

Please note: 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.

Pre-release access list

Guidance

Related statistics

Contact details

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

Community Services Data and Analytics Team
NHS England
Quarry House
Leeds, LS2 7UE
england.communityhealthservicesdata@nhs.net