Eugene Mooney to Ed Humpherson: Temporary suspension of accredited official statistics status of the NIAS ambulance statistics within the Northern Ireland Hospital Statistics: Urgent and Emergency Care publication.

Dear Ed,

I am writing regarding the official statistics accreditation of the Northern Ireland Hospital Statistics: Urgent and Emergency Care publication.

Official statistics accreditation of this publication is based on both emergency department (ED) data and ambulance service data that is derived from different sources. In the latter case the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) implemented a new Clinical Response Model (CRM) in 2019 with further changes to the system implemented in 2021.

You will appreciate that these changes were enacted during the period of the COVID19 pandemic and the subsequent major digital encompass implantation programme. This major transformation in how the delivery of services are managed throughout health and social care services in NI have had a significant impact on our ability to validate and extract information from the system. Our focus has quite rightly been to ensure that what is published meets the standards required from the Code of Practice and our engagement with the encompass programme is directed towards ensuring that this is the case. Despite the very significant resource that we have devoted to this exercise I feel that we have not been able to fully scrutinise the new data for the ambulance response times. My preference is to undertake a Quality Assurance of Administrative Data (QAAD) exercise during the next year to fully understand the NIAS procedures and data quality. My intention would be to ‘badge’ the NIAS sourced data as “official statistics in development” during this review stage and then as appropriate seek an official statistics accreditation review by OSR ahead of publication following this review.

I trust that you are content with the proposed approach and of course happy to be guided by any views you may have in this respect.

Yours sincerely,

Dr. Eugene Mooney

Head of Profession, Information Analysis Directorate, Department of Health NI.