Digital Dataset in the Correct Format

Response to this request is long overdue. By law, under all circumstances, Department of Health and Social Care should have responded by now (details). You can complain by requesting an internal review.

Dear Department of Health and Social Care,

the Labour MP Chi Onwura recently asked Nadine Dorries the following;-

"To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) organisations with addresses outside the UK and (b) private sector organisations had access to NHS Digital data sets for the purposes of research and planning in each of the last five years."

The response she received suggested that the data was not available in the format requested... which makes no sense.

Please could I make the same request, for the same information... and add for the avoidance of any doubt that I will happily accept the data in *any format you have available* (and, being very familiar with technology for coverting data... if necessary accept the burden of converting that data format into something more accessible on your behalf).

Yours faithfully,

P John

Owen Boswarva left an annotation ()

When a Government department says in a written answer to an MP that the information is "not held in the format requested", that usually means the information it holds isn't organised in a way that enables it to answer the question. It's not a matter of data formats.

Also the question is rather broad. Many NHS Digital datasets are non-personal and publicly available on the web. So technically the answers to (a) and (b) could be "all of them".