Publication - Statistics

Inpatient census 2018: guidance and documentation for data suppliers

Published: 28 January 2019
Topic: Health and social care

Guidance and documentation for data suppliers for the 2018 Inpatient Census.

This page contains guidance and documentation for data suppliers for the Inpatient Census, 2018. This will be carried out at midnight on 28 March 2018.

The Inpatient Census for 2018 is the fourth Mental Health & Learning Disability Inpatient Bed Census, which was carried out for the first time in October 2014. You can find the previous publications here. In addition to the publications, Health Boards can apply to see management information dashboards. Please use the Contacts Page below to get in touch for more information.

There are three parts to the Inpatient Census:

Mental Health and Learning Disability Inpatient Bed Census
Mental Health and Learning Disability Patients: Out of NHS Scotland Placements Census
Hospital Based Complex Clinical Care and Long Stay Census (for patients who are not occupying Mental Health, Addiction and Learning Disability Inpatient Beds).

Data for the censuses will be collected using ProcXed.Net

The technical documentation (template spreadsheet and XML schema) will be made available in due course.

Notes providing detailed guidance to the staff in NHS Boards who are responsible for providing the data for the censuses are attached.

A list of Frequently Asked Questions relating to the censuses is available here: FAQs

A Privacy Impact Assessment has been carried out for this data collection - this can be accessed here: Privacy Impact Assessment

Suggested text for privacy notices, to inform patients of how their data will be used: Privacy Notices

What is a Privacy Impact Assessment?

Any project that involves the collection of personal information inevitably gives rise to privacy concerns.

A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) helps to identify privacy risks, anticipate problems and propose solutions. It is a relatively new self-assessment process for evaluating a proposal:

to identify its potential effects upon individual privacy and data protection compliance
to ensure that the project complies with the data protection principles and
to consider how any negative effects might be overcome.

What is privacy?

Privacy can be defined as follows;

'Interpreted most broadly, privacy is about the integrity of the individual. It therefore encompasses many aspects of the individual's social needs.' (Taken from the Information Commissioner's Office's PIA Handbook)

For the purposes of completing a PIA, the handbook identifies four aspects of privacy: