Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs)

This provides an indication of the outcomes or quality of care delivered to NHS patients and has been collected by all providers of NHS-funded care since April 2009.

The PROMs publications contain provider level data and data for England and CCGs.  Registered providers can access data on a monthly basis via our provider extract service. Publications occur biannually in February and August and are provisional until the data set is declared finalised.

Following changes to the reporting schedule for publications finalised full-year data will now be published six months earlier. Previously published in August, this will now be February. This decision was made due to address reporting needs amongst key users of the data for calculating more-timely finalised PROMS data.

PROMs data was collected on varicose vein and groin hernia procedures in England, however following on from the NHS England Consultation on PROMs, collection of these procedures ceased on 1 October 2017. Finalised data for varicose vein and groin hernia procedures for 2016/17 and for April 2017-September 2017 has now been published. Historical data will be unaffected.

To add to the value of the PROMs questionnaire data, they are linked routinely with Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) episode-level information. In 2021 significant changes were made to the processing of HES data and its associated data fields which are used to link the PROMs-HES data. The linking methodology has now been updated and an overview of these changes described below.

The completion of the development and assurance work in our operational processes needed to update the linkage methodology was longer than expected which has caused a subsequent delay in the timeliness of our PROMS publication series. The provisional April 2021 to March 2022 publication which normally would have been published in August 2022 will therefore be followed by publication of the finalised publication of PROMS data which normally would have been published in February 2023 for the time period in July 2023. This will bring our publication reporting sequence of PROMS data up to date for users of these statistics. Additionally, we once again apologise for any inconvenience this delay may have had for the users of these statistics.

The PROMs data is linked to HES data in 4 stages: Patient matching, provider matching, date matching and a 'tie-break' to pick the best match if multiple episode matches occur. Changes have only been made to the patient matching stage. The previous methodology used the patient identifiable data from the PROMs questionnaires to find a matching patient identifier (HESID) in the HES data. The same method has been used; however the patient identifier is now the Master Person Service (MPS) person identifier (Person_ID). Find more information about MPS and HES changes.

We ran the two linking methodologies in parallel which confirmed this change had a minimal effect on the linked PROMs-HES data, with around 0.1% of questionnaires being affected. We also saw a small increase in the number questionnaires linking with episodes. More information can be found in the updated PROMs guide.