Security and Consent

The NDA has been granted authority to collect patient identifiable data under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2001 by the Patient Information Advisory Group (PIAG)

Organisations and people with diabetes can feel confident that participating in the audit is legal and ethical. Written consent from patients is not required to submit their data to the audit. Further information can be found on the Patient Information available on the publications page.

Datasets

The NDA collects demographic and observation data for people with diabetes from both primary care and secondary care. There are eight mandatory fields which must be completed for each patient record submitted. This includes NHS Number, type of data i.e demographic/process or complication, year of birth, postcode, sex, organisation code, source unit and diabetes type. Records which do not contain the full compliment of mandated fields will be rejected.

The NHS number is essential for linkage of complication data and allows the removal of duplicate records. In addition, for secondary care complication data is also collected from participating units. The complete CSV upload specification for both primary and secondary care is listed below:

• 2010_2011 CSV Specification for Secondary Care