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Written question asked by Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Conservative) on Wednesday, 18 March 2009, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Friday, 20 March 2009. It was answered by Ben Bradshaw (Labour) on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 on behalf of the Department of Health.

Medical Records: Databases

Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many (a) records and (b) data fields there are in (i) the Population Demographics Service, (ii) the Summary Care Record, (iii) the Secondary Uses Service, (iv) the Electronic Prescription Service, (v) the Out of Hours system, (vi) the Picture Archiving and Communications system, (vii) the Radiology Information System, (viii) Choose and Book, (ix) the Detailed Care Record system and (x) the National Childhood Obesity Database.
Answer

Comprehensive information on numbers of records is not available. Out of hours, radiology, and most detailed care records systems, are procured and managed locally by primary care trusts and national health Service trusts. Information is not collected centrally on the number of records these systems hold, or on the number of detailed care records held in data centres operated in connection with the national programme for information technology.In addition, while national activity data is collected and published on an annual basis about imaging and radiodiagnostic examinations and tests, it is not possible to differentiate historic data in terms of those that were stored using picture archiving and communications systems.For other systems, information as at 13 March 2009, is in the following table.

System/Service Records/data items
Personal Demographics Service A record for every patient treated by the NHS in England - approximately 70 million records
Summary Care Records 249,000 records
Secondary Uses Service 1.3 billion coded data summaries
Electronic Prescriptions Service 178 million prescription messages
Choose and Book 14.4 million bookings
National Childhood Obesity Database 2.388 million records

Information on data fields could only be obtained at disproportionate cost. Systems involve the use of application software, and in some cases multiple applications, each with its own data model containing potentially thousands of data fields. There is no database function that will count the number of data fields in a database, and to do so would involve a manual process that could take many hours in each case.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
490 c1102-3W;490 c1098-9W; 265743
Session
2008-09
Subjects
Databases Medical records
Contains statistics
Yes
Link
View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk