The Neonatal Critical Care Minimum Data Set (NCCMDS) provides a record of what happens to a patient when they receive neonatal critical care in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), Maternity Ward or Neonatal Transitional Care Ward.

Version 1.0 of the NCCMDS was introduced in April 2007.

The primary purpose of the NCCMDS is to allow the operation of the National Tariff Payment System (NTPS) within neonatal critical care. It supports the NTPS by specifying and facilitating the capture of data needed to generate a Neonatal Critical Care Healthcare Resource Group (HRG) for each calendar day (or part thereof) of a period of neonatal critical care.

The HRGs are, in turn, used for:

• reimbursement
• commissioning
• cost monitoring
• workload planning (clinical and non-clinical)
• benchmarking.

Data is collected by specified providers of neonatal care and sent directly to NHS Digital’s Secondary Uses Service (SUS), as a subset of the Admitted Patient Care Data Set (in turn a subset of the Commissioning Data Sets, ISB 0092).

This information standard is maintained by the National Casemix Office within NHS England. It is related to SCCI0076 Paediatric Critical Care Minimum Data Set, in that it shares common fields and values, including an agreed list of Critical Care Activity Codes.

About this change

Version 2.0 of the Neonatal Critical Care Minimum Data Set maintains the data items introduced in Version 1.0 and, in order to support local use (clinical care and audit) and costing, introduces the following:

• addition of 14 additional values to CRITICAL CARE ACTIVITY CODE
• re-naming of DISCHARGE METHOD (HOSPITAL PROVIDER SPELL) to DISCHARGE METHOD CODE (HOSPITAL PROVIDER SPELL).

The aggregate activity and costing data generated through Version 2.0 will continue to form part of the annual provider submissions of reference costs data to the Department of Health.

Note that there is no change to the existing (Version 1.0) data flow to the Secondary Uses Service (SUS).

Data extracts produced for submission to SUS must not contain the new Version 2.0 codes. SUS checks that all Critical Care Activity Code values are in an enumerated list based on Version 1.0; as with other such validation if a value is not found on the list the whole interchange will be rejected.

On the next update of CDS, a supporting change to this data set will be made to allow the new codes to flow to SUS.

At present, the change to the standard is for (a) local use and (b) submission of reference costs.