GPES Physical Health Checks for people with Severe Mental Illness (PHSMI) data collection

A Data Provision Notice (DPN) has now been issued for this new data collection.

The data, as specified by the DPN, supports a Direction from NHS England. Organisations that are in scope of the notice are legally required to comply.

General Practices will be sent an invitation to participate via the Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS). This invitation must be accepted as there is a Direction in place for this data collection and it is a legal requirement for General Practices to provide this data under section 259(1)(a) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. All General Practices are therefore mandated to comply with this invitation and approve the collection.

As NHS Digital is collecting personal data from General Practices through this collection, General Practices have a legal duty to be transparent and to provide patients with transparency information under GDPR about the data they are sharing with NHS Digital. Therefore, General Practices need to update their own Transparency Notices on their websites to include details of this collection.

NHS Digital has issued a Transparency Notice for this data collection. It is intended that General Practices should be able to link to the information included in the NHS Digital Transparency Notice to enable them to perform their legal duty in providing adequate fair processing information to their patients.

About Physical Health Checks for people with Severe Mental Illness (PHSMI) data collection

The General Practice Extraction Service (GPES) will require an initial full-year extract of data and thereafter an extract on a quarterly basis. The first extract is scheduled to take place in the second half of 2020-21 financial year and will cover the previous financial year of 2019-20.

PHSMI will collect identifiable patient level data, which will be held by NHS Digital. A full list of the data items to be collected can be found in the Directions Specification at Annex A.

The data will be used to monitor the implementation and impact of commitments to close the mortality gap for people with severe mental illness.

The data set will be used to track delivery against the NHS Long Term Plan commitment and aggregate counts on the number of physical health checks and interventions delivered (that is the number of people on the GP SMI register in receipt of individual physical health checks and interventions).

Currently Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) PHSMI delivery is monitored via a quarterly NHS Digital Strategic Data Collection Service (SDCS) collection, collecting, and reporting aggregate CCG-level data on the numbers (for instance counts) of physical health checks and follow-up interventions delivered. This manual process is burdensome. This will be replaced by this automated collection by GPES which will create an efficient, automated extraction process.

There is a dedicated section about Data Provision Notices and Directions on the NHS Digital website.