Surveillance of STIs in primary and community care

GUMCAD2: GUMCAD in non-GUM commissioned enhanced sexual health services (ESHSs)

The Genitourinary Medicine Clinic Activity Dataset (GUMCAD) used for surveillance of STIs from GUM clinics has been piloted in ESHSs, services providing comprehensive STI management outside of the traditional GUM setting, through the GUMCAD2 project. The pilot examined the feasibility and acceptability of rolling out GUMCAD to these services to improve STI surveillance in order to better estimate the burden of sexual ill health in the population, and the impact of changes in service delivery. It demonstrated that all fields are already or can easily be recorded in clinic software, can be sent to the HPA in electronic format and are implementable, interoperable, safe, acceptable and fit for purpose.

Conditional approval was received from the Information Standards Board and an Advanced Notification (AN)  issued to all clinics and their software providers in November 2010. Full approval has now been received and an Information Standards Notice (ISN) will be issued by the end of July 2011. All ESHSs should be collecting GUMCAD2 by 1st January 2012.

Project Plan – GUMCAD2 (PDF, 683 KB)
Guidance Material (PDF, 102 KB)

General Practice Extract Service

The NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care (NHS IC) has secured provision of a centrally managed primary care data extraction service, known as the General Practice Extract Service (GPES). This service will allow different public sector bodies to obtain health statistics from all general practices in England. A proposal to extract a range of sexual health indicators consistent with GUMCAD via GPES has been developed by the HPA in collaboration with the DH Sexual Health Policy Team and the Primary Care STI Surveillance Group. The NHS IC is currently developing the mechanisms and procedures to set up GPES and roll-out of the service will be in two phases. Phase one will cater for national enquiries from customers such as the DH, HPA and other NHS central bodies, phase one is due to be delivered in 2011/12.

Analyses using sentinel general practice databases

In the interim, the HPA/University College London collaborative group has undertaken research on STIs diagnosed in primary care through use of sentinel datasets such as the General Practice Research Database (GPRD)  and QRESEARCH.

Please contact the primary care lead, Mandy Yung, for further information about any of these initiatives (mandy.yung@hpa.org.uk / 020 8327 7556).

Last reviewed: 26 July 2011