NHS Contraceptive Services - England, 2010-11, Community contraceptive clinics [NS]

Note: Following assessment by the United Kingdom Statistics Authority the statistics in NHS Contraceptive Services: England publications were recommended to continue designation as National Statistics subject to a number of requirements being met.

As part of satisfying these requirements, an updated Data Quality Statement has been issued on 2 April 2012. The revisions include a new ‘Relevance' section, further detail on the coverage of the data and how the data are returned, and clarification that many of the initial problems as organisations implemented the SRHAD data collection were resolved before final data were submitted, therefore limiting any affect on the data.

This annual report presents information on NHS community contraceptive clinics which include family planning clinics and clinics run by voluntary organisations such as Brook Advisory Centres. This data has been collected since 1988/89 through the KT31 return.

Information on NHS community contraceptive clinics excludes services provided in out-patient clinics and those provided by General Practitioners. However, limited data is presented for out-patient clinics sourced from The NHS Information Centre's (NHS IC) Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), prescription data and survey data from the ‘Contraception and Sexual Health 2008/09' report, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on behalf of the NHS Information Centre.

A new quarterly attendance level collection known as Sexual and Reproductive Health Activity Dataset (SRHAD) started in 2010/11 and it is currently running alongside the KT31 return.

For this year's publication we received data from 166 organisations. 137 of these submitted full year data via KT31, 15 submitted full data via SRHAD, and 14 organisations migrated to SRHAD part way through the year and therefore submitted part year KT31 and part year SRHAD data.

Even though the data are collected on a completely different basis (see data quality statement), the mapping and subsequent analysis of the SRHAD data are considered to make them comparable to the KT31 data. There are some data that are not available via SRHAD and these do have an effect on the figures presented (including the totals) but these are considered to have a minimal effect on the figures.