The government hasn’t published data to support its claim about the NHS App stopping 1.5 million appointments being missed
Last week the Government announced that “reform” of the NHS App has prevented 1.5 million hospital appointments from being missed. It also made a number of other claims about the impact of the app, including that it has “saved almost 5.7 million hours of staff time” since July.
This may be the case, and the 1.5 million appointments figure has been reported in the media, and cited by at least one minister. But there’s currently no published data to support the claim, which means we’re unable to verify it.
We’ve contacted the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) a number of times about these claims, and it told us on Wednesday that it would share the data with us soon. At the time of writing we had not received it—we’ll update this blog when we do.
The government’s press release last week appeared to claim that the “accelerated rollout” of the app prevented 1.5 million appointments from being missed, although it’s not immediately clear what that covers, or how the figure has been calculated.
When Full Fact asked the DHSC what the claim was based on, it told us the data hasn’t been published and the claim was based on “internal figures”. (It did not initially respond to our subsequent requests to share these, before later saying it was working to provide them.)
This seems to be at odds with the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) guidelines on Intelligent Transparency, which say: “Data to support any public statement should be published in advance or at the same time as the statement is made… Where unpublished data are referred to unexpectedly, the information should be published as soon as possible after any statement has been made.”
This is not good enough. Government departments must provide evidence for what they say, and ensure that any statistics and data they rely on to back up their claims are provided publicly in accordance with the Code of Practice for Statistics or relevant guidance.
Nor is it the first time we’ve raised concerns about the government making claims based on unpublished data. Last September, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer cited unpublished immigration data in a speech at the Labour party conference. The Home Office later published it following Full Fact’s intervention.
We have contacted the OSR about the government’s NHS App claims.