Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how data on urinary tract infection instance in clinical settings is being collated at a national level, following the suspension of the National Safety Thermometer and the move to data collection at Trust level.

NHS England requires English hospital providers through the National Health Service Standard Contract to submit data detailing hospital activity relating to NHS-provided or NHS funded care. This data is collated and published by NHS Digital. It includes hospital admissions where the patient was diagnosed with urinary tract infection. This can be found in the annual Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) Admitted Patient Care (APC) dataset at the following link: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/hospital-admitted-patient-care-activity

Separately, the United Kingdom Health Security Agency undertakes surveillance of bloodstream infections in hospital and community settings, including information on the infection source through NHS acute trusts reporting infection cases.

NHS safety thermometer data collection was stopped in March 2020 due to emerging evidence that the data collected was incomplete and not being used as intended to support safety improvement and in part to support the COVID-19 response by freeing up nursing time.