Data Use And Access Bill Factsheet - Improving Public Services

24th October 2024

The Data (Use and Access) Bill will unlock the power of data to drive efficiencies in our public services. This will relieve health and police front-line workers from bureaucracy so they can focus on treating sick people or spend more time on our streets fighting crime.

NHS information standards
Information standards: explainer
Information standards in relation to the health and adult social care sector are focused on the processing of patients' information.

When patients move within the health and care system, it is in the patients' interests that their health and care provider can effectively access information relevant to their care.

It is therefore important to ensure that information flows through the system in a standardised way, in a consistent, accessible format, in a way that ensures it is always meaningful to and easily understood by any recipient or user.

Effective information sharing is reliant on the ability of IT systems across health and adult social care to be interchangeable.​ Information standards can be set that enable this, by allowing for information to be shared easily and in real time between organisations that use different systems.

The NHS does not lack data; rather, it faces challenges due to data being fragmented across multiple sources. To unlock the full potential of the NHS, we need to strengthen the underlying infrastructure, improve data quality, and radically enhance the user experience. Only then can we leverage innovative technologies and ensure the long-term sustainability of the NHS.

What is changing
Legislation will improve clinical outcomes, speed up the delivery of care, and reduce duplication in lab tests and medication errors, by making information standards mandatory for all suppliers of IT services to the health and care system, ensuring health and care data is recorded and managed in the same way. This will lay the foundations for patient information to flow safely, securely, and seamlessly.

The effective use of interchangeable data will benefit both patients and health and care professionals, creating a more responsive and efficient healthcare system.

IT providers provide essential products for day-to-day clinical tasks in the health and social care system, however they are currently not uniformly based on information standards that enable information to be accessed and shared in real time across the entire health and social care system. ​

The benefits of legislation
Once law, the Bill will help save a huge 140,000 hours of NHS staff's time in one year alone, because staff will have quicker access to patient data, saving time that can then be spent face-to-face with patients who need it most and potentially saving lives.
More up-to-date and accurate patient records could reduce duplicate lab tests by 8.8%, and duplicate diagnostic tests by 10%. This could save £65.4 million over 10 years.

Patient safety will improve as health and care staff will no longer need to re-enter data across systems and care settings as often, with the potential to reduce medication errors by 6.8 million and prevent 20 deaths per year related to medication errors occurring during transfers, discharges and referrals.

Law enforcement justification
Law enforcement justification: explainer
Currently, every time a police officer in the UK accesses or discloses someone’s personal data, they have to record the reason for accessing or disclosing it, as well as the date, time, and, if possible, the identity of the persons accessing, disclosing, or receiving the data. Accessing personal data would include, for example, looking up a suspect or person of interest on the police database.

Recording a justification every time an officer consults or discloses data is burdensome, time consuming and does not achieve the purpose envisaged for keeping logs, which is limiting the misuse of data. However, manually input justifications are of little value and are rarely relied upon, as persons misusing data are highly unlikely to admit to this in a formal log or to enter an honest justification. For this reason, we are removing this one element of the logging requirements, and retaining the others that are useful.

What is changing
The Data (Use and Access) Bill is removing the need for an officer to explain, in writing, the reason why they have accessed or disclosed someone’s personal data every single time they do so. This is because it provides limited value in ensuring accountability for the processing activities carried out by law enforcement agencies.

As the current systems lack the ability to automatically record the explanation for accessing personal data, it must be recorded manually. This places an unnecessary burden on officers, and also means the justification is likely to be of little use in a misconduct investigation.

The benefits of legislation
The Data (Use and Access) Bill will:

free up to 1.5 million hours a year of valuable police time for our officers so they can focus on tackling crime on our streets rather than being bogged down by admin
save approximately £42.8 million per year in taxpayer’s money