Department of Health

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12 month plan

  • Last modified date:
    18 December 2008

December 2008 to December 2009

This 12 month statistics publication plan for Department of Health is updated monthly to enable statistics users to see what we will be publishing over the next year.

Some information is included on statistics released by the Health Protection Agency and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. Plans for statistics to be released by the Information Centre for health and social care can be found at the related link on the right of this page.

Note on healthcare acquired infections data - publication timetable

(updated 15 October 2008)

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) and the Department of Health (DH) have been working towards earlier publication of mandatory Meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteraemia and mandatory Clostridium difficile surveillance data. This will take effect from the publication of January to March 2009 (Q4 2008/09) data.

In the meantime, and in view of the public interest, DH have requested and the HPA have agreed that the publication of MRSA data from the beginning of 2008-09 should be brought forward with effect from the April to June 2008 (Q1 2008/09), which was published on 18th September 2008.

It has been agreed by the technical experts in DH and HPA that this change should still produce figures within existing standards of tolerance for accuracy. As previously, changes to figures may occur as a result of retrospective validation, and these will be published in subsequent quarters.

It is not possible to bring forward the publication of Clostridium difficile data in the same way because of the larger data set and greater complexity of the outputs (which will include Primary Care Organisation outputs). Clostridium difficile data for April to June 2008 (Q1 2008/09), published on 23 October 2008, is on the same basis as before, i.e. national and NHS trust level. The Department of Health in conjunction with the HPA have decided to defer the publication of quarterly C. difficile mandatory reporting data by Primary Care Organisations (PCOs) because analysis of the reported C. difficile infections for the year April 2007 - March 2008 indicated that the quality of the baseline year (Financial year 2007/08) is not sufficiently robust for publication in its current format.  PCO data originally scheduled for October 2008 will now be published in April 2009. This will include the 2007-08 baseline data and the first three quarters of 2008-09. For further information, see

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