Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve data sharing between private and NHS hospitals.

The Acute Data Alignment Programme (ADAPt) was established on 9 January 2018, and was launched in June 2018. The ADAPt Programme is jointly led by NHS Digital and the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) in partnership with stakeholders from the Department, NHS Improvement, NHS England, and the Care Quality Commission.

The programme has served to develop good working relationships between PHIN, NHS Digital and key stakeholders. The first phase focuses on ensuring that independent hospitals and National Health Service private patient units are submitting robust, complete and accurate data to PHIN, and that performance measures already required to be published by Order of the Competition and Markets Authority can be achieved as quickly as possible. The second phase will ensure the data flows from independent providers into NHS Digital, just as it does from NHS providers, enabling consistency in measurement and understanding of both risk of harm and health outcomes for patients wherever they are treated.