As an organisation, we place a strong emphasis on collaboration and seek to collaborate not just between our own teams but with our customers and external stakeholders. We design our data products and services with our customers in mind, regularly conducting user research, capturing feedback, and running user groups to ensure they meet customers’ needs throughout their lifecycle. Through our partnerships we aim to identify and mutually agree on approaches, encouraging alignment of priorities across various stakeholders and ensuring that our work adds value while avoiding duplication of effort.
This includes being active members of the Health Statistics Leadership Forum, where we work alongside statistical leaders from across health statistics in England to ensure collaboration across all our statistical work, providing a clear, joined up narrative for health statistics in the public domain.
Where appropriate, we collaborate with other organisations to facilitate streamlined access to data including making some of our primary care data available through the NHS England Data Access Request Service (DARS) process and sharing NHS Workforce data to contribute to Official Statistics publications produced by NHS England. Ongoing projects such as the NHS England Federated Data Platform may offer further similar opportunities. We are committed to actively engaging with relevant stakeholders to gain further insights into how we can best support and benefit from such solutions.
We are also active members of several national and regional networks including the Association of Professional Healthcare Analysts (AphA), the Government Data Quality Community, AnalystX, the NHS R Network, and the Government Statisticians Group (GSG). These networks provide opportunities for shared learning, enabling us to work more efficiently. Our teams also regularly showcase their work at conferences, opening opportunities for further networking and collaboration and championing the great work we do. We recognise the value of these activities, and this is something we will continue to promote and support moving forwards. We also look to provide users of our data with similar opportunities through online communities and by offering the opportunity to ‘comment on data’ made available on our Open Data Portal.
To support our collaborative efforts, we endeavour to improve understanding of the data we process and hold. We have created a data catalogue and committed to publishing this to support external stakeholders in understanding the data we hold and enable the identification of further opportunities through which it can deliver value. We have also identified a need to document the external data sets we depend on to deliver our services. By doing this we will have a centralised record of the data we access and the delivery mechanism we have used to ensure consistent approaches are adopted across the organisation potentially delivering efficiencies of scale.
Commitment
We will continue to collaborate by:
- supporting the NHSBSA and sponsors to use data to inform policy decisions, design, deliver and manage services
- sharing best practice, ensuring coherence and exploring where our data further supports the wider NHS
- working more closely with our customers, so that we solve problems together and co-create solutions that meet user needs and benefit the wider health system