Five data problems facing public health officials
BMJ 2016; 353 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i3312 (Published 14 June 2016) Cite this as: BMJ 2016;353:i3312
1. Perception
Public Health England’s medical director, Paul Cosford, told MPs on the House of Commons Health Committee that, although its data on staffing showed “really quite a positive picture,” people still had “uncertainties” about the stability of the public health workforce.1 “There is no evidence I’m seeing that we’re getting significant reductions in numbers of trained public health specialists in posts,” he said.
2. Understanding
Cosford said that his organisation was seeking to improve the workforce data it held to “navigate our way through and make sure we really understand what’s going on underneath.” He added, “We’re implementing a national minimum dataset for the public health workforce, which we expect to have in place by 2017. We are piloting it now so we do understand the situation in much greater detail.”
3. Analysis
MPs asked Public Health England whether it was concerned about the shortage of data analysts in the new public health system. “There will never be enough people,” replied John Newton, Public Health England’s chief knowledge officer. “There are so many data, and so many questions we might ask, that we will never have enough capacity to analyse all that we want.”2
4. Access
Public health directors cannot access the data they need to do their jobs, and this makes it hard for them to do “ad hoc” research locally, Newton said. He said that public health directors had difficulty getting access to data on healthcare activity and on the services they commission, such as vaccination and screening services.
5. Barriers
Newton said that legal barriers also meant that identifiable personal health information would be passed to local government only on a strictly controlled basis. He said that these access problems were “surmountable” and that “legal gateways” existed but that access relied on good local relationships between NHS and local government bodies.
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