The United Kingdom Health Statistics Steering Group – Workplan

Our vision is to enhance the coherence, production, dissemination and accessibility of health and care statistics in the United Kingdom. We aim to bring together different agencies to reduce duplication of statistical releases and make sure that health policies are evidence based.

Our remit is to:

• develop a long-term strategy for improving the coherence and accessibility of statistics
• improve the coherence and accessibility of health and care statistics
• oversee topic networks – this includes giving advice on priorities and resolving problems that might affect their work or lead to duplication of work
• encourage harmonisation across the topic networks – this will improve coherence across health and care statistics
• encourage the production of new and innovative insights from linked data products
• improve the co-ordination and communication of health and care statistics – this will help users to get all the information they need to make effective decisions
• encourage user and public engagement to make sure there is open communication between statistics producers, users, and the public – this will help to improve trust and confidence in the data

We have produced a workplan to help us meet our remit. We aim to:

• develop a long-term strategy for improving the coherence and accessibility of statistics – we will also work with producer agencies to include the strategy in their operational plans and models
• continue developing the information resources from the 2019 to 2024 workplan
• understand the role of senior leaders of the health and care system and how we interact with them – this will help us to work with them to provide strategic leadership, develop resource and make decisions beyond the remit of the producer groups
• improve the user engagement of the UKHSSG – this will help to make sure that we communicate openly about health and care statistics
• open communications with the devolved nations in the UK to share good practice and promote theme group membership across the four nations
• share resources and upskill analysts to help them produce high quality statistics using linked data

It is important that we do not just concentrate on improving the health and care statistics landscape for England. We should also aspire to improve coherence and accessibility of health and care statistics across the UK.

We acknowledge and respect the fact that health and social care is a devolved matter.

We will work to improve the coherence of health and care statistics where possible through harmonisation of standards for the UK. This is important because it means that health and care data are available across the UK and can be compared internationally.

We will:

• make sure that theme groups think about the UK perspective and invite representatives to appropriate meetings – this will help to encourage harmonisation and coherence across the UK
• have representation from across the UK at UKHSSG meetings – by having members of the group from devolved nations attend at least one meeting each year we can strengthen our relationship and share information
• make sure that we share successes from each country so the nations can learn from each other