WIREDGOV

The Department of Health, working in partnership with the Public Health Observatories in England, has yesterday  released baseline data for the Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF).

The Public Health Outcomes Framework Healthy lives, healthy people: Improving outcomes and supporting transparency, published in January 2012, set out a vision for public health, desired outcomes and indicators to aid understanding of how well public health is being improved and protected.

The framework concentrates on two high-level outcomes to be achieved across the public health system and includes 66 supporting indicators, grouped into four ‘domains’ that cover the full spectrum of public health:

• Domain 1: Improving the wider determinants of health
• Domain 2: Health improvement
• Domain 3: Health protection
• Domain 4: Healthcare public health and preventing premature mortality

This release of baseline data for the Public Health Outcomes Framework 2013-2016 includes data for the first set of 39 indicators at Englandand upper tier local authority level.  The data are presented in an interactive data tool which allows users to view data in a user-friendly format and in particular to:

• Benchmark local authorities against theEnglandaverage
• Compare local authorities against other authorities in the region
• Download a summary report for a local authority
• Download data for further local analysis

The data tool also provides links to further supporting and relevant information to aid understanding of public health in a local population.

Updates to the PHOF data tool will be added in due course; in particular outstanding baselines will be added as they become available to reflect ongoing technical development work.

Background notes

1. Baseline data are published via the Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF) data tool on their website.
2. A refreshed set of policy documents, including technical specifications for all the indicators, have also been published today on the Department of Health website to reflect technical developments in the indicators since the first publication of the framework in January 2012.
3. The data currently published in the PHOF data tool are the baselines for the Public Health Outcomes Framework indicators.  The baseline period is 2010 or equivalent, unless these data are unavailable or not deemed to be of sufficient quality.  For some indicators, data for periods following the baseline may already be published elsewhere – please refer to the “publication of source data” section in the PHOF Part 2 technical specification document or the definitions tab of the data tool.
4. As part of this release, a number of indicators are presented disaggregated by some of the equalities and inequalities strands.  Over time, the number of indicators, and range of such breakdowns, presented will be expanded.
5. This release is an official statistics publication, produced in line with the principles and protocols set out by the UK Statistics Authority in the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.