COVID-19 and NICOR

To our colleagues in hospitals:

Firstly, thank you for all your hard work at this difficult time. We are acutely aware of the issues the NHS is facing.

From Monday 23 March NICOR will temporarily be moving to email only support. After careful consideration, in order to protect our staff and reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus most of our London-based team will be working remotely for the foreseeable future. We will be sending regular bulletins to keep you informed.  Technical Helpdesk support, general enquiries and audit queries will all be dealt with via email by our team in the normal way. Unfortunately we will not be able to receive phone calls nor pick up any voicemail messages.  We will continue to do our very best to support you and the audit teams.  However, if the NICOR staff are redeployed to support the Barts clinical teams there may be a reduction in our service, but we will keep you informed.

We thank you all for your understanding.

 The NICOR Team​

National Data Opt-out deadline changed to 30 September 2020

The health and social care system is going to face significant pressures in the coming months due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Staff will need to work in different ways than usual and we want to ensure that they can focus on responding to these events.

NHSX and NHS Digital have therefore made the decision to extend the compliance deadline for the national data opt-out and the final date for submission of the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) to 30 September 2020.

Data submission during COVID-19

The joint data controllers for the National Cardiac Audit Programme, the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) and NHS England/Improvement are working on guidance for NHSE Trusts regarding the impact of COVID-19 on clinical audit. This will be available soon – please check back here for details or on the HQIP website www.hqip.org.uk. Or follow us on Twitter @CardiacAudit

We acknowledge the difficult and stressful time that colleagues are experiencing at this moment. As such, we have taken the decision to relax the deadlines for all data entry. We would ask centres to continue to collect the data, as after the pandemic there will be a big demand for this data. However, don’t worry about the timelines if you are unable to submit your data on our IT platform. This can be done when the pandemic has cleared. Please keep an eye on our website as we will continue to post updates.

Information data sharing – COVID-19 interim measure

During the COVID-19 crisis the national cardiac audit programme and other clinical audit programmes may be approached by funders for rapid information to assist with emergency planning. To minimise delay HQIP have agreed that the following applies to all audits/projects as an interim solution:

• As a temporary measure aggregate, anonymous data (suitable for an information sharing request) in support of COVID-19 can be provided to funders (i.e. NHS England/Improvement, Welsh Government) without seeking prospective permission from HQIP
• These information sharing requests must be logged and a record provided to HQIP (they can be sent through to the datasharing@hqip.org.uk inbox to be retrospectively logged)
• Unit level data can be provided to funders via an information sharing request (usually unit level is not permitted as standard)
• Small numbers must still be suppressed
• DARG applications still need to go through HQIP for approval.

Data access for researchers

Please email nicor.datarequests@nhs.net and your queries will be responded to in the normal way. Please note that whilst NICOR staff are working remotely telephone services are not available.  Therefore please do not leave any voicemail messages on any NICOR phones.