Specialist advice activity data

The data are available by ‘type of specialist advice’. For the purposes of the ‘system elective recovery outpatient collection (EROC)’, the different types are categorised as:

• Pre-referral Advice & Guidance (A&G)
• Post-referral’ triage services that offer specialist advice
• Other’ equivalent models.

The System EROC requires ICBs to coordinate and submit monthly specialist advice activity data from all organisations raising specialist advice requests from within their ICB, and details relating to the organisation responding to the request.

The ICB level data provides a national view of specialist advice requests raised across England. This dataset is available by ICB, type of specialist advice and specialty grouping.

The Provider level data represents a subset of the national dataset. This is based on the organisation responding to the request. This dataset is available by acute NHS providers, type of specialist advice and specialty grouping.

The data are presented as total requests, processed requests, and diverted requests. Full data definitions relating to the types of specialist advice, measures and categorisations are included here.

The underlying data are available by specialty (Treatment Functions Code) and have been aggregated to show specialties in, and out of, scope of the elective recovery fund (ERF).

Additional information relating to scope of System EROC, types of specialist advice and specialty groupings are included in the latest data files.

England time series data by type and measure:

Time series data available for the latest 12 months (rolling):

Full dataset (csv) from April 2022:

Interpreting the data
Data are available from April 2022 to the latest available reporting period.

The ICB and provider time series include data from the latest 12-month period, with the full dataset from August 2021 available in csv format.

The data included here will always include the latest available data as reported by ICBs. This means that the latest position is subject to change as we receive more detail relating to the outcome and status of the specialist advice requests.

This is particularly relevant when viewing activity data for ‘Processed’ and ‘Diverted’ requests, due to a lag in the reporting of outcomes and statuses for requests that are raised toward the end of the reporting period. This lag in the underlying data means that there is an expected general downward trend for these measures in the most recent months. This reporting gap should reduce over time as the data are refreshed each month.

As this is a relatively new data collection, having launched in August 2021, we advise caution when interpreting these data as we continue to improve data quality.

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