Costing submission window extended

NHS England and NHS Improvement said that, following a request to NHS Digital, the submission window for 2020/21 cost data will now close on Friday 26 November instead of the original end of October deadline.

The national costing team identified four issues that had affected the submission process. In a costing update email to the service, it said that NHS Digital’s Strategic Data Collection Service has been operating as a ‘degraded service’. On some days submitters experienced significant downtime and had not received confirmation that their XML files had been validated at NHS Digital.

Further technical issues also meant some XML files were not always accepted by NHS Digital systems on the first submission by providers. And there has been a material impact on summary reporting, which has not been available for a significant number of trusts after their submission.

The update also said that some providers had experienced ‘serious system issues’ that had led them to request a change in submission date.

‘NHS England and NHS Improvement have considered the impact of these issues on the ability of providers to quality assure the data they have submitted to NHS Digital and are concerned that, without an extension to the window, there would be a significantly higher risk that these issues would result in a lower data quality,’ it said.

The extension applies to the mandatory collections and not a subset of trusts. Scheduling will continue in the extension period, although the costing team will have increased flexibility to amend submission dates for trusts. The notice also said that summary reporting for all trusts will continue until the end of the extension period.

However, the extension will have a knock-on impact on other parts of the costing programme. For example, the NCC data publication will be delayed, although no dates have been provided. This year’s voluntary community early implementer collection will also be delayed and is now scheduled to start on 13 December 2021 and close on 14 January 2022. 

The 2021 review and feedback exercise will also be pushed back. NHS England and NHS Improvement also said that the development of NCC workbook items for patient-level costing would ‘not be implemented under soft implementation in 2022’.

This is understood to refer to chemotherapy, radiotherapy and community midwifery costs which are currently collected at a summary level in the NCC workbook. The plan had been to have a ‘soft’ move to the NCC main patient-level collection, giving trusts a dry run next year ahead of later mandation.

Instead, 2022 is expected to be a year of minimal change except for the mandation of patient-level costing submissions for community health services.

The national costing team has also agreed with NHS Digital that a further extension to the window for 2021 could be implemented if this proves necessary.