Website of the Department of Health

12 month plan

September 2008 to September 2009

This 12 month statistics publication plan for Department of Health is updated monthly to enable statistics users to see what we will be publishing over the next year.

Some information is included on statistics released by the Health Protection Agency and the Commission for Social Care Inspection. Plans for statistics to be released by the Information Centre for health and social care can be found at the related link on the right of this page.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) and the Department of Health (DH) have been working towards earlier publication of mandatory Meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteraemia and mandatory Clostridium difficile surveillance data. This will take effect from the publication of January to March 2009 (Q4 2008/09) data.

In the meantime, and in view of the public interest, DH have requested and the HPA have agreed that the publication of MRSA data from the beginning of 2008-09 should be brought forward. The date for publication of MRSA data for April to June 2008 (Q1 2008/09) is the 18th of September 2008.

It has been agreed by the technical experts in DH and HPA that this change should still produce figures within existing standards of tolerance for accuracy. As previously, changes to figures may occur as a result of retrospective validation, and these will be published in subsequent quarters.

It is not possible to bring forward the publication of Clostridium difficile data in the same way because of the larger data set and greater complexity of the outputs (which will include Primary Care Organisation outputs). Clostridium difficile data for April to June 2008 (Q1 2008/09) will be published on 23 October 2008.

• Download DH statistics publications plan: September 2008 to September 2009 - updated 15 August 2008 (PDF, 25K)