Health department must improve “trustworthiness” of seven day service data, Statistics Authority says

Abstract

The Department of Health for England should improve the “trustworthiness, quality, and value” of the data it produces on seven day services, the UK Statistics Authority has said. The authority’s director general for regulation, Ed Humpherson, wrote to the health department on 1 November after receiving a query from a member of the public about a speech made by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, at the Conservative Party’s conference on 4 October.1 In his speech Hunt said that “just one in 20 hospitals” were meeting a target to have highly vulnerable patients checked by a …