Data Collection

The data used by the Scottish Arthroplasty Project comes from SMR01 (Scottish Morbidity Record). All NHS Acute Hospitals in Scotland submit an SMR01 record for every inpatient or daycase patient episode. All SMR01 records are submitted to the Informations Services Division, NHS Scotland, where they are held on a central database. This data is held under the strict confidentiality guidelines which were laid down by the Data Protection Act of 2000. More information about confidentiality and data protection is available here.

SMR01 records contain information about a patient's whole episode of care, including the date they were admitted, their diagnosis, the date and type of any procedures they had, the consultant who was responsible for their care and their date of discharge. This makes it possible to select all those patients that have undergone an arthroplasty procedure from the national database for the Scottish Arthroplasty Project.

If a person is transfered to the care of a different consultant or a different hospital, a new SMR01 record is started. For example, if a patient is admitted under the care of consultant Bloggs, has an operation and then is transferred to the care of consultant Other and is discharged home, two SMR01 episodes will be submitted for that patient. At PHS, all of these episodes can be linked together, together with the General Register Office death records. This means that a 'patient history' can be produced; i.e. when a patient was admitted to hospital, when they were discharged and then whether or not they were readmitted at a later date. This is extremely useful for the arthroplasty project, as it allows complication rates to be worked out by analysing how many patients are readmitted for a particular reason, eg a joint infection.

Although PHS holds all the SMR01 information, this data still belongs to the hospital that submitted the information. This means that any mistakes in an SMR01 record can only be corrected by the hospital.

For more information on SMR01 and other national datasets collected by PHS, please visit the PHS website at Public Health Scotland.

For more information on OPCS codes used by SAP to identify arthroplasties on the SMR01 database click here.