Contact: Jill Stott

Contact: Jill Stott

Contact: Jill Stott

CCG Administrator

Tel: 0161 622 4260

Fax: 0161 622 6528

22 May 2012

To all Oldham EMIS practices:

Dear colleague

To be able to really improve the health of people in Oldham, we need to be able to use information from every GP practice in Oldham to inform decisions the CCG Governing Body makes, on your behalf.

Where possible we will use this data to inform our assurance framework and collateit with hospital admissions data, for example. This will help us to better understand the health needs of local people, where improvements to their care or local services can be made and, most importantly, whether we are succeeding in delivering improved health outcomes for our patients.

The number of people living with a long-term condition (LTC) is rising and will continue to do so as our population ages. This will create a greater demand on us as GPs and also on hospital services.

In light of this, we particularly want to be able to collate information that helps us understand the health needs of people with a LTC and make sure the services we are providing and the prescribing decisions we make are improving their health.

This has prompted us to develop our LTC improvement programme, which is part of an evidence-based national programme that aims to provide holistic care to patients with LTCs. It will enable patients to better manage their own care and have access to a stronger and bigger primary care team. This in turn will help us to manage this rising demand on us.

We already know that we have your support to deliver this improvement programme, because you have signed up to the CCG Constitution, which included your agreement to share data to help us deliver our commissioning intentions. You have also agreed to implement the urgent care dashboard and use the risk profiling tool as the urgent care component of QoF.

What do we need you to do?

In order for the improvement programme to be a success, we now need you put in place a data streaming and data sharing system. Instructions on how to set this up are attached to the email. If your practice is not currently streaming information, you will be encouraged to do so and may already have received an invitation from EMIS.

To ensure that the appropriate information governance assurances have been met we have used a ‘Privacy Impact Assessment’ screening tool. This makes sure that the information being shared conforms to the principles of The Data Protection Act and information governance.

It’s important that patients are aware that you are sharing this information, why and who it is being shared with and, most importantly, that their information is secure. A statement is attached to the email that explains all of this. Please print this off and display it on your notice board and upload it to your practice website, if you have one.

If you have any questions, you can contact the following people:

  • For technical or governance-related queries contact David Crowther, Business Intelligence partner, on 0161 622 6402 or email
  • For CCG Governing Body queries contact Jill Stott, CCG administrator, on 0161 622 4260 or email

Kind Regards

Ian Wilkinson

Dr Ian Wilkinson

Accountable Officer

Oldham NHS Clinical Commissioning Group