HSCIC

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 sets out our responsibilities, which include:

• Collecting, analyzing and presenting national health and social care data

• Setting up and managing national IT systems for transferring, collecting and analyzing information. We can be directed to do this by the Secretary of State or NHS England

• Publishing a set of rules (called a Code of Practice) to set out how the personal confidential information of patients should be handled and managed by health and care staff and organizations

• Building up a library of 'indicators' that can be used to measure the quality of health and care services provided to the public

• Acting to reduce how much paperwork doctors, nurses and care workers have to complete by ensuring that only essential data is collected, and that we avoid collecting the same information twice

• Helping health and care organizations improve the quality of the data they collect and send to us by setting standards and guidelines to help them assess how well they are doing

• Creating a register of all the information that we collect and produce, and publishing that information in a range of different formats so that it will be useful to as many people as possible while safeguarding the personal confidential data of individuals.