Management information in the National Health Service: the use of the child-health computer system

Abstract

During the last decade, well over half of all the health districts in England and Wales have started to use the national standard child-health computing system, in particular, the vaccination and immunization module. The usefulness of the system in recording data about individual children is well proven, similarly its use as an administration system in scheduling appointments and in routinely producing aggregated statistical information.However, the system also allows for the collection of a variety of data on individual children and indeed their mothers. Such data could be of use in answering management questions in the services such as, ‘which children do not attend for immunization’, ‘what are their characteristics’ and ‘what changes could be made to the services in order to achieve the policy objectives of higher levels of immunization uptake’. The management initiatives suggested by the Griffiths Report emphasized the use of information in management decision making. The analyses reported in this paper demonstrate how existing information can be used to answer and ask management questions, and also suggests that possibly some modifications to the existing data systems should be introduced in order to enable better management to occur. The analysis concentrated on the data relating to the uptake of measles immunization in one health district.