Summary

Description

This annual report primarily presents information on NHS community contraceptive clinics (family planning clinics and clinics run by voluntary organisations such as Brook Advisory Centres). This has been collected since 1988/89 through the KT31 return. Information on NHS community contraceptive clinics excludes services provided in out-patient clinics and those provided by General Practitioners. However, limited data is presented for out-patient clinics sourced from the Health and Social Care Information Centre's (HSC IC) Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), prescription data from the Prescribing team at the NHS IC, and survey data from ‘Contraception and Sexual Health 2008/09', a report published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on behalf of the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC). A new quarterly attendance level collection known as Sexual and Reproductive Health Activity Dataset (SRHAD) started in 2010/11 and it is currently running alongside the KT31 return. For this year's publication we received data from 171 organisations. 92 of these submitted full year data via KT31, 50 submitted full data via SRHAD, and 22 organisations migrated to SRHAD part way through the year. The remaining 7 organisations submitted SRHAD part year because their services were transferred either to or from another organisation. Even though the data are collected on a completely different basis (see data quality statement), the mapping and subsequent analysis of the SRHAD data are considered to make them comparable to the KT31 data. There are some data that are not available via SRHAD and these do have an effect on the figures presented (including the totals) but these are considered to have a minimal effect on the figures. October 2012 note It has been identified that some of the data received in relation to the NHS Contraception Services: England publication series have been under-reported from 2006/07 to 2010/11 due to a coding error. Nationally this has resulted in first attendances being under-reported by approximately 5 per cent for each of the affected years. The error has been corrected nationally for the 2011/12 publication. Previous publications have not been amended. Please see the errata note for further information. The HSCIC apologises for any inconvenience this may have caused.