The NVR collects patient identifiers as part of the data required. Consent has to be obtained by the vascular teams for all patients entered on the NVR in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Consent is only required for elective patients in England and Wales, as the NVR has Section 251 permission to collect identifiers without consent for emergency admissions. When entering data on the NVR, if the option of ‘no consent’ is selected, the user is still able to enter the patient’s clinical record details, but is unable to add any personal identifiable information.
The NVR is linked to the AAA screening programme IT System in England and Northern Ireland. As the NVR and these Screening Programmes are both hosted by Northgate, patient identifiers are securely transferred between the two systems. This is done each day in the early hours of the morning. If a man is found to have a AAA via these screening programmes, is referred for surgery, and has given consent for his data to be used, then the NHS number is shared with the NVR. Once the patient record is created and submitted on the NVR, details of the operation are automatically shared back to the man’s record on the screening programme IT system.
Users of the NVR IT system (surgeons, radiologists, anaesthetists, hospital administrators) can export their data from the IT system for their own analysis. These exports contain the full patient identifiers.
The NVR project team is only able to export pseudonymised data from the NVR IT system for analysis for the various outputs that they are commissioned by HQIP to produce.
Anonymised extracts of NVR data can be requested by third parties for a particular study. These data requests are managed by the NVR project team and HQIP, as part of HQIP’s DARS process.
The NVR collects and maintains details of clinicians and admin personnel as part of a contact database. This is used for newsletters and correspondence around annual reports and the consultant outcomes programme.
NVR Dataflow Diagram (PDF – 883kB)