This is one of a series of reports prepared under the provisions of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007. The Act requires all statistics designated as National Statistics at its enactment to be assessed against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics (the Code) in order for them to gain National Statistics status. The report covers the statistics produced by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) derived from the National Study of Health and Wellbeing in England: Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS). The results of the 2007 survey were published as a combined package of Adult Psychiatric Morbidity in England, 2007 (APMS 2007) and Autism Spectrum Disorders in adults living in households throughout England – report from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2007 (ASD 2007), which were published separately due to different production timescales. For ease, we refer to the forthcoming statistical report covering the 2014 statistics as APMS 2014.
Since the Department of Health (and partners) fund HSCIC to run the APMS every seven years, this Assessment has taken place ahead of the publication of the main survey outputs. The Assessment of the survey outputs has therefore been based on a combination of outputs previously published in 2009 (from APMS 2007) and early draft documents for APMS 2014 due for publication in September 2016 (Annex 1 provides more information).
This report also includes an assessment of HSCIC’s continuing compliance with organisational aspects of the Code. It is usual practice for the Authority to periodically review organisational compliance as part of its assessments. The assessment findings for the statistics (APMS) and the organisation (HSCIC) are presented separately for the first time in this report in Sections 3 and 4 respectively. This presentational approach is designed to help the Head of Profession for Statistics in assigning responsibilities for responding to the Requirements. It remains the case that all Requirements must be met for National Statistics designation to be confirmed.
This report was prepared by the Authority’s Assessment team, and approved by the Regulation Committee on behalf of the Board of the Statistics Authority, based on the advice of the Director General for Regulation.