Public health directors have so far received local authority-level counts of the number of people vaccinated, broken down by age cohorts and by ethnicity at the lower tier local authority level, which cover a district or borough council.
While local public health officials have welcomed what data has been made available to them, they also expressed frustration at the slow progress, with local government continuing to push the NHS to provide more data after weeks of discussions.
HSJ understands they have been promised individual patient-level data from the NHS, but there is no clear timeline for providing this.
There is also confusion around data sharing, with one DPH telling
Officials welcome progress distributing vaccine uptake data but say it is not granular enough
Comes after NHSE promises to start routinely recording ethnicity
Local public health officials have said they are still not getting detailed enough data to track any inequalities in uptake of the covid vaccine, seven weeks into the national immunisation drive.
Sir Simon Stevens told MPs at a select committee hearing this week that the NHS is sharing local data on uptake with directors of public health. However, public health directors have told
HSJ they are not getting enough granularity to help ensure equal access to the vaccine.
REUTERS/Carl Recine
NHS England is facing growing criticism from public health leaders over its failure to publish data on the ethnicity of people who have been vaccinated against covid-19.
Leaders at the British Medical Association, the Association of Directors of Public Health and the independent NHS Race and Health Observatory are among those calling for this data to be released in real-time in England and across the UK as a whole.
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The swift release of data is vital, says Chaand Nagpaul of the British Medical Association. “It gives you a snapshot understanding of the level of vaccination coverage amongst ethnic minority health care workers and the community so that you can then target your effort to try and address lower uptake of the vaccine,” he says.
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