The Emergency Care Dataset (ECDS) is the national dataset for urgent and emergency care, allowing for more consistent and standardised identification of key injury groups (through injury intent fields) as well as supporting the collection of Information Sharing to Tackle Violence (ISTV) data items. The North West team at NHS England and NHS improvement, and NHS Digital Data Liaison Service (DLS) have been working with trusts to improve understanding of ECDS, data collection and quality.
This work led to a collaboration between the NHS teams and TIIG to host two workshops with NHS Trusts to improve ECDS collection, but also provide information to Trusts on why ECDS and ISTV data collection is important. Whilst this data is pivotal in improving patient care and hospital planning, it also supports wider work taking place by Local Authorities, Public Health, Community Safety Partnerships and police to reduce injuries and violence.
Workshop attendees were asked to rate their knowledge of ECDS, and their understanding of its importance at the start and end of the session. Only 38% of attendees felt extremely or very confident in their knowledge of ECDS pre session, with 40% rating that they understood its importance. These figures jumped to 83% (knowledge) and 86% (understanding) post session. Similarly, those who were not very or not all confident pre session dropped from 35% (knowledge) and 31% (understanding) to 0% for both post session.
We are now planning more workshops with NHS England to expand on this work. If you feel this would be useful for your Trust or you would like to know more about ECDS, please email DLS.