Telephone enquiries, please contact: Trevor Reed on telephone (0113) 206 5885

Dear Mr Clark

Re: Freedom of Information Act (FOI)

I am writing in response to your e-mail on 21 January. You requested information under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. It is my responsibility to respond to such requests on behalf of the Trust. Your queries are reproduced below along with our responses.

Could I obtain the number of people who were diagnosed with chemotherapy-induced febrile neutropenia and the number of deaths due to chemotherapy-induced febrile neutropenia in 2008?

The Trust does not hold this type of information at summary level.

You may be aware of recent national reviews in this area and the recent NCEPOD report, which required a considerable amount of coordination and resource nationally. The Trust does not have ready access to this same level of detail without undertaking a process that would involve the retrieval of large numbers of individual patient records and these would then need to be analysed, interpreted and summarised manually.

As you may already be aware, there are limitations to the obligations placed upon public bodies by the FOI Act and the above process would not be possible without exceeding our obligations under the legislation.

We could provide you with a report on patients who have had chemotherapy and who have subsequently been admitted with a neutrophils count of less than 1 but such a result does not necessarily mean that the patient had neutropenic sepsis.

We could also produce a report on patients who were admitted acutely following chemotherapy with a neutrophils count of less than 1 and then died within 30 days of admission. As above, and as mentioned in the NCEPOD report, this does not imply that death was due to the neutropenia.

The above reports would take us about a day to produce but before we expend this amount of resource I would be grateful if you would confirm that the outcome will be useful to you.

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as convenient.

If you are unhappy with the service you have received in relation to your request then please write to Trevor Reed at the address shown above. If you continue to be dissatisfied you have the right to contact the Information Commissioner. Generally, the Commissioner cannot make a decision until you have exhausted the Trust's complaints procedure. Should you wish to contact the Information Commissioner you can do so by writing to The Information Commissioner's Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF.

Yours sincerely

Ross Langford

Deputy Director of Marketing and Communications

Section 12 of the FOI Act 2000 stipulates that there is no obligation to comply with a request for information where the total cost of doing so would exceed `the appropriate limit'. In the case of public bodies such as the NHS, the `appropriate limit' has been set at £450 with a rate of £25 per hour (equating to 18 hours' effort in total).