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NCISH / Resources / Frequently asked questions / Obtaining data FAQs

Obtaining data: frequently asked questions

Questions answered on this page:

Can I request data from the NCISH?

Yes. Individuals submitting data, audit teams and commissioners of services can access data through bespoke data requests. Currently, data requests must be initiated by the Medical Director of the healthcare organisation. Data requests provide individual trusts with benchmarking data for their trust in the context of the national data. Our annual reports provide some data on a regional basis, where appropriate.

Annually, we provide a Safety Scorecard to the Medical Director of each mental health trust in England. This Scorecard provides benchmarking data to support quality improvement.

All our outputs and information about our work programme are available via our website – including PowerPoint data slides for download.

We actively engage with clinical, commissioning and policy stakeholders through presentations at professional meetings and training days. We inform the public of our work through events, presentations, print and social media. However, we are bound by the conditions stated in the data sharing agreements we have with our data providers which are intended to safeguard the identifiable clinical information that they share with us and therefore it may not always be possible to respond to a request if it risks breaching these agreements. See our privacy notice for further information.

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What happens to the information I provide?

We publish annual reports which include analysis of the most recent year of national data on patient suicides, as well as trends over time. In addition to annual reports, we publish project reports investigating specific patient sub-groups.

We recommend changes to clinical practice and policy to reduce the risk of suicide and improve the safety of mental health patients. We only publish aggregate figures, and we follow Office for National Statistics guidance about small numbers – we don’t publish low counts, and we never share information about an individual.

For more information on how we use the sensitive information that we collect in our work, and the rights you have if you think that we hold information about you as a data subject please refer to our privacy notice.

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