Through a collaborative approach, we developed a common approach to reporting health inequalities metrics, enabling consistent, comparable reporting across NHS integrated care boards (ICBs) and allowing local teams to focus on addressing health disparities.

Background

In November 2023, NHS England issued a legal statement requiring ICBs and NHS trusts to report on 24 indicators of health inequalities, grouped into 11 key areas. These indicators should be broken down (where possible) by age, sex, deprivation level, and ethnicity. The data and a summary of each ICB’s efforts to reduce health inequalities must be included in ICB annual reports. However, no central guidelines were provided on how to calculate these metrics.

Action

To support this requirement, NHS Midlands and Lancashire (NHS ML) received requests for assistance from several ICBs. Recognising the value of a shared approach, NHS ML pooled its Business Intelligence resources and collaborated with analytics experts from the three other commissioning support units: NHS Arden & GEM, NHS South Central West and NHS North of England. Together, they developed a common, detailed approach for all ICBs.

Through a series of collaborative workshops, the team established a common method for reporting health inequalities metrics. This included agreed data sources, calculation methods, criteria for excluding data, age-standardisation, and breakdowns by ethnicity and deprivation.

Impact

This collaborative approach has enabled all ICBs supported by the commissioning support units to report health inequalities metrics consistently. This consistency allows for easier comparison and benchmarking, providing valuable insights into health inequalities at regional and national levels and driving improvements in data quality. As a result, local teams can now focus more on creating plans and adjusting commissioning strategies to address health inequalities, rather than spending time on data sourcing and calculations.

In October 2024, the collaborative team was in discussions with NHS England’s Health Inequalities Improvement Team, led by Prof Bola Owolabi, to explore the possibility of creating a unified national reporting solution for health inequalities available to all ICBs.

Feedback

“This is a great example of the value of partnering with the CSU. There was a requirement to produce a suite of health inequalities data driven by NHS England. Having this picked up by the CSU and done once to support ICBs was great. LLR is just finalising its first report on health inequalities setting out our progress against the 11 domains and the actions that we are taking to improve health equity. The centralised data processing has meant that we have been able to focus our work on the interpretation of the data and the progress that the system is making rather than on metric production. We are really hoping to see the product expanded next year to grow the scope of what we are able to do with our local reporting.”

Janine Dellar, Head of Strategic Business Intelligence, Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Integrated Care Board

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