2019 Data from England and Wales

It is that time of year again and the QOF data for England and Wales is now on the website. This is a relatively quiet year as there have been no changes to the indicators in England (unlike 2019/20 when there quite a number of changes). Data from Wales is quite limited as they basically only have disease registers now and a couple of indicators concerning the administration of the flu vaccine.

Primary Care Networks do not currently feature in the results. NHS England do not seem to acknowledge their existence in statistics just yet and so even nearly four months after they were officially formed (at time of writing) there is no record of who they are or the practices that make them up. It would be possible to crowdsource some data but even OpenPrescribing, who have things like staff and a budget, think that it would be too much to do. I will try to put the data on when there is eventually a list, although quite how they fit into the hierarchies is not clear.

Also at time of writing there is no data available for Northern Ireland.

There is some change to the Welsh data this year. I try not to change previous years but this year NHS Wales published codes for their GP clusters as well as the health boards. I had always just made up my own in the past. The health board codes that I used were taken from the id of their page on an old version of NHS Wales website. I have updated the codes for these organisations to the official ones which should make integration with other data sources easier. Old links to the pages should still work as well - there is some translation in the software.

There is a constant prediction that QOF is going away. In fact it has been renewed for an, apparently, five year term. There is a lot more to be done.

Whilst you are here, if you are interested in how medical information is coded you are probably aware of the roll out of Snomed CT across the NHS. For a gentle introduction to Snomed I have written a book Starting Snomed - available on Amazon and on Kindle. If you have Prime and a Kindle it is included in your package!