National Data Guardian: Response to consultation on priorities

Earlier this year the National Data Guardian (NDG) for Health and Social Care, Dame Fiona Caldicott, launched a consultation on proposed priorities for action – her office having been placed on a statutory footing in December 2018. The office of the National Data Guardian advises and challenges the health and care system to help ensure that citizens’ confidential information is safeguarded and used properly.

As a charity with a keen interest in health and social care data and technology, we welcomed this opportunity to engage with the National Data Guardian about its future priorities.

Our own work to enable key stakeholders to harness the value of health and care data has involved extensive research, policy development and advocacy activity as well as several related publications: Intelligent Sharing, our parliamentary briefing for the House of Lords debate on September 6th 2018, Facilitating Care Insight and, most recently, Taking Next Steps to Harness the Value of Health and Social Care Data.

Crucially, if the National Data Guardian is to make further progress in ‘getting the basics right’ to improve outcomes for individuals, we recommend that her office devotes more time and energy to data impacting social care planning and provision than has been the case to date, and our detailed recommendations point toward areas she might usefully explore in more depth.

We look forward to the outcome of the consultation and to continued dialogue with the National Data Guardian in future.