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F268

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Mid Staffs Inquiry · Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry · Issued 6 February 2013 · Addressed to: Healthcare providers

Government responseDepartment of Health and Social Care: Accepted (Nov 2013)

DeliveryDHSC and NHS England say in progress (Feb 2026)Department of Health and Social Care states no delivery position (Feb 2015)

Recommendation, verbatim from the inquiry

●Inquiry recommendation

Resources must be allocated to and by provider organisations to enable the relevant data to be collected and forwarded to the relevant central registry.

Mid Staffs Inquiry, Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry · 6 Feb 2013 Source PDF →

Published evidence summary

AI-generated evidence summary

The Inquiry called for healthcare providers to allocate resources to collect and forward data to central registries. In commentary of September 2024, published in February 2026, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England stated that resources have been allocated to support data collection, though forwarding data to central registries was not mentioned (DHSC and NHS England, Feb 2026). In May 2024, the Thirlwall Inquiry legal team noted that the government had accepted the recommendation and expected commissioning bodies to fund provider data collection through overall contract budgets (The Thirlwall Inquiry legal team, May 2024).

AI-generated summary of the record on this page, checked by a second model and automatic checks, 1 Oct 2026.

About this summary
This recommendation applies across many organisations. The record above reflects central policy activity; adoption in individual organisations may vary.

Report-level response context

Government responded via "Hard Truths: The Journey to Putting Patients First" (2014), a single document covering all 290 recommendations with a blanket acceptance. Individual recommendation responses were not broken out.

Government response

●Department of Health and Social Care · Accepted · 19 Nov 2013

Speaker not recorded. Source: Department of Health, Hard Truths: the Journey to Putting Patients First, volume 2 (Cm 8777-II), November 2013

Accepted.
In order to ensure that good quality data is collected locally and made available to central repositories such as the Health and Social Care Information Centre, resources need to be available to providers of services such that collections of data can be undertaken.
A wide range of data is collected locally to be used by providers, commissioners, regulators, patients and the public to determine performance and compliance with basic requirements of quality and safety. For example, recommendation 246 discusses data needed for comparable quality accounts and 98 recommendation outlines the reporting of serious patient safety incidents via the National Reporting and Learning System.
Where collections are mandated, resources are allocated to the provider as part of their overall budgets, by the relevant commissioning body via the NHS Standard Contract, to ensure their collection. It is the responsibility of all providers to ensure that resources are allocated internally to ensure that data are collected and made available as appropriate.
In addition to this, we also support initiatives that improve the use of appropriate technology and remove unnecessary burden from the collectors of data. The NHS Confederation’s review, Challenging Bureaucracy (2013), the work and tools developed by the Health and Social Care Information Centre in busting bureaucracy, and NHS England’s Clinical Bureaucracy Index are all intended to support a reduction of burden, nationally and locally, to allow staff to focus on the delivery of good quality care.

Extract from: Hard Truths: The Journey to Putting Patients First. Volume Two of the Government Response to the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry: Response to the Inquiry's Recommendations

Site note: This is volume two of "Hard Truths: The Journey to Putting Patients First" (Cm 8777-II), the government's response to the Inquiry's 290 recommendations, published by the Department of Health on GOV.UK on 19 November 2013 and dated to that day here. The PDF the row links to is the accessible edition, whose title page reads "January 2014". The Department of Health has been the Department of Health and Social Care since January 2018. The volume says it includes accounts from each of the national organisations the recommendations name, but it does not mark which passage each organisation wrote, so every row is filed under the Department that published it.

Delivery

●DHSC and NHS England say in progress · 27 Feb 2026

Resources have been allocated to support data collection. Patient outcome statistics are publicly available through various platforms, including NHS England’s website, the CQC’s inspection reports and NHS England’s public portals.

From: The Thirlwall Inquiry: Review of Implementation of Recommendations from Previous Inquiries into Healthcare Issues (version dated April 2025)

Site note: DHSC and NHS England's own account of progress, supplied to the Thirlwall Inquiry in September 2024 and printed in the Inquiry legal team's Review of Implementation of Recommendations from Previous Inquiries into Healthcare Issues (version dated April 2025, published 27 February 2026). It is not a finding of the Inquiry. Their reviewed extent of implementation reads “Implemented – Ongoing”. Table row: section 18.2 No. 268, PDF page 568.

●Department of Health and Social Care states no delivery position · 11 Feb 2015

No further update is required. Please see response to the recommendation in Hard Truths

From: Culture Change in the NHS supporting Annex (annex to Culture change in the NHS: applying the lessons of the Francis Inquiries)

Site note: This is the supporting annex published on 11 February 2015 with "Culture change in the NHS: applying the lessons of the Francis Inquiries" (Cm 9009), attached to the GOV.UK page as "Culture change in the NHS supporting annex". The annex has no title page; that title is GOV.UK's and the PDF's own. Its table has four columns (No., Recommendation, Hard Truths Government response, Progress update), and the row carries the Progress update cell. No column says which organisation wrote an update, so the row is filed under the Department of Health (now the Department of Health and Social Care), which published it.

Site note: The Inquiry addressed this recommendation to healthcare providers, not to the Department of Health. The annex gives this update in the Department's publication and does not say who wrote it, so the row is the Department's report of the progress made on it.

What other bodies have found

In their own words. These do not change the delivery statement above.

●Thirlwall Inquiry legal team · 15 May 2024

This recommendation was accepted by the Government.

In its January 2014 Hard Truths report, the Government said that where collections were mandated, resources would be allocated to the providers as part of their overall budgets, by the relevant commissioning body via the NHS Standard Contract. It was the responsibility of all providers to ensure that resources are allocated internally to ensure that data are collected and made available as appropriate.

From: The Thirlwall Inquiry: Review of Implementation of Recommendations from Previous Inquiries into Healthcare Issues (version of 15 May 2024)

Site note: The Thirlwall Inquiry legal team's own notes on implementation, from its Review of Implementation of Recommendations from Previous Inquiries into Healthcare Issues (version of 15 May 2024). The review does not colour its Extent of Implementation cell for this recommendation green; it leaves the cell uncoloured where a recommendation was rejected, where evidence of implementation was insufficient, or where steps had been taken but implementation was not yet complete. Table row: section 16.2 No. 268, PDF page 522.

How this page is built

The recommendation and the government responses are verbatim from primary documents. Delivery statements and other bodies' findings are shown in their own words, each with its source. The summary is written by this site and labelled as such. The Index does not paraphrase sources or characterise intent; it records what has been published.