Dementia Data Extract

Purpose and outline

This data extract is designed to collect detailed information from GP practices on the patients who are, or may be, at risk of dementia. It will also collect data about patients diagnosed as living with dementia and the care they receive, and information about patients with dementia who are prescribed anti-psychotic drugs.

A practice will make an opportunistic offer of assessment for dementia to ‘at-risk’ registered patients, where the practitioner considers it clinically appropriate to make such an offer. Where an offer of assessment has been agreed by a patient, the practice will provide the assessment. An opportunistic offer is an offer made during a routine consultation with a patient identified as ‘at risk’, and where there is clinical evidence to support the offer.

When deciding to offer an assessment, practitioners are expected to use their clinical judgement and take into account any concerns raised by the patient or their carer.

Evidence suggests that dementia diagnosis rates in BAME groups and seldom heard communities are particularly poor; therefore the challenge recognises the importance of improving the diagnosis of dementia for such individuals. This provides the justification for adding ethnicity counts to this data collection, as the number of patients with a dementia diagnosis in their clinical record, broken down by ethnicity, is not currently collected.

Anti-psychotic medication is sometimes used to control behavioural problems in patients with dementia. This practice can be very damaging to those patients and is discouraged. This collection will allow monitoring of the level of this prescribing with the intention that there will be a sustained decrease over time.

This service is on CQRS to record a GPs agreement for data extracts to take place only. No data from this service will be recorded in CQRS and there is no payment attached to this service.

How this service is commissioned and provided

Dementia assessment is now a core contract requirement to be offered when the attending GP believes it’s clinically appropriate. It was identified as part of the 2016-17 General Medical Services (GMS) contract agreement with the General Practitioners Committee (GPC) that NHS England will continue to collect dementia activity data, in order to inform future decision making linked to dementia care.

There is no service specification as this is now a core contract requirement.

Information about this service:

  • Quality service start date: 01 October 2017
  • Quality service end date: 31 March 2023
  • Payment period: N/A
  • Collection frequency: Monthly
  • Manual or automatic entry: Automatic
  • Included in data collection: All system suppliers (TPP, INPS, Microtest and Emis)
  • Co-commissioning: No
  • System type: GPES service (Core contract)

MI counts/clinical codes

Commissioners and practice should refer to our supporting business rules for information on management information counts and clinical codes.