Final decision on NCC submission to be taken by July

The 2023 national cost collection has been hit by delays as a result of staffing difficulties at NHS England, partly driven by the merger between NHS England and NHS Digital. It set the ‘no earlier than’ 18 September date in March to provide some guidelines for organisations to plan their work load over the summer.

Last year’s submission window opened two months earlier in July. This year’s Approved costing guidance was also published this week following significant delays – last year’s guidance was published in March – with the delays coming in the context of calls to improve the timeliness of costing data.

However, in a costing learning session this week to introduce the revised guidance, NHS England said that a recruitment process was under way and a number of data engineers and business analysts had now joined the costing team. The message remains unchanged – the submission window – will open no earlier than 18 September. However, the team has set a ‘go/no go’ date of 10 July, by which time it will assess if the date is achievable and officially confirm the dates for the collection.

The structure of the collection will remain unchanged. There will be a three-week window when trusts can make as many submissions as they want to refine the data. This will be followed by a fourth week when all organisations will be required to make a submission (if they have not already done so) – with specific days allocated to organisations in different regions. A one week pause for data quality analysis will then be followed by a two-week window for any required resubmissions.

The Approved costing guidance has been streamlined this year to reduce the reading burden on costing practitioners and to make it easier to navigate. This year’s 519-page guidance is 175 pages fewer than last year and the guidance has almost halved in size since 2018. The guidance for acute, mental health, community and specialist trusts is included in just two publications – integrated costing standards and NCC guidance. And there are separate versions of these publications for ambulance trusts.

There are a number of planned changes this year as the costing transformation programme reaches its conclusion. All maternity services provided by trusts are now included, covering community or hospital settings and the patient’s home. A number of other activities previously reported at aggregate level via a costing workbook are also now required to reported at the patient level. These include: chemotherapy; radiotherapy; specialist rehabilitation; renal dialysis; and specialist palliative medicine.

With new currencies under development for mental health and the move away from mental health clusters, the requirement to report clustering data has now been removed.

NHS England also announced that it had now brought the development of a new data validation tool (DVT) in-house. It had previously talked about moving to a new DVT using an external organisation, but this is no longer going ahead. The new tool is billed as a major improvement on the previously used DVT and will also have some advantages over the earlier proposed outsourced solution . It will be cloud based, have reduced information governance complications, enable the automated submission of valid files and have some improved reporting outputs.