Data Collection

Data collection #

Original PHE data collection #

Public Health England carried out a Team Level Population Health Intelligence Skills Mapping within Nottinghamshire in 2018. The tool mainly comprised data collection which described the number of full time staff within each organisation with skills in the following areas:

  • Database design, development and operations
  • Data sharing and information governance
  • Data linkage
  • Data sources for population health intelligence
  • Database analysis
  • Routine monitoring
  • Analytics
  • Predictive analytics
  • Benchmarking and measuring variation
  • Statistical analysis
  • Research and evaluation skills
  • Data science skills
  • Data visualisation
  • Communication to different audiences
  • Consultancy skills
  • Options appraisal
  • Population health approaches

Skills were defined at four levels:

  • 0: No experience of this skill group or do not need this skill set within their role (this can be all of the team)
  • 1: Has an understanding of this group of skills
  • 2: Using the skills outlined in this competency regularly as a core component to the work that they do
  • 3: High level of expertise in this work area and are supervising or training/ teaching other staff within this area

Repeating this analysis was not felt to be productive on its own, however a more detailed set of data was collected which contained the original data spec- with the repeated part of that data collection shared back with PHE.

New data collection #

Domains were added to the data collection instrument based on the five areas of interest identified within the ICS:

  • Demand and Capacity
  • Population Health Management
  • Health Inequalities
  • Transformation and Efficiency
  • Place based partnerships

One other domain was added to the data collection instrument based on discussions within the project group:

  • Knowledge of healthcare domains, datasets, and clinical coding systems

Population health management was not added because it already existed within the original tool. Economic analysis was also identified as an area of interest but is covered in the original tool under Options appraisal. Arguably it would be better to disaggregate options appraisal to leave health economic analysis as a separate domain, but keeping the tool broadly in line with the previous PHE led exercise was felt to be valuable and so it was left in its original form.

Adding time spent using skills #

As well as the extra other domains, an extra measure was added to each domain, which would assess the amount of time actually spent on the different domain areas. Estimating the actual time spent on 20+ domains was not felt to be a reasonable request and so four levels of use were defined:

  • 0: Never
  • 1: Once or twice a year
  • 2: Monthly
  • 3: Weekly