Many of you will have spent a longtime with the matching reports so we thought you might like a thumbnail sketch of how the process works. It might also help explain why things don’t match straight away.

There are 5 patient identifiers shared between (SPOT)light and the CMP data: sex, date of birth, NHS number, postcode, and CMP number.

We take each emergency admission reported to the CMP, and look among all your (SPOT)light reports for a perfect (5 out of 5 fields) match. If we can’t find a perfect match then we’ll drop an identifier (e.g. postcode) and try for a 4/5 match, then put that identifer back and drop the next. Perfect matches get flagged as complete, 4/5 matches typically get flagged as presumed, and 3/5 will ask for your help confirming. We then check that the (SPOT)light visit has occurred before the ICU admission since visits after the admission are likely to be follow-ups and ineligible. If the ward visit was more than one week before the ICU admission we’ll also ask you to confirm that the admission was for another unrelated problem.Finally, we then repeat the whole cycle checking admissions to units in other hospitals in case the patient was transferred).

This means that each week the ‘matching procedure’ looks at more than half a million possible checks!