Appendix 1 Guide for recording assessment tools

The capture of clinical scored assessment tools or scales (like the lung cancer screening health check), is central to improving service quality and accountability.

At an overview level, where individual patients are anonymised, service providers and commissioners can see a performance pattern for the service.

The assessment tools within scope of the Lung Cancer Screening Data Set (LCSDS) should only be included in submissions if they are currently in use and appropriate for the service. If any of the below tools are not used by the service, they should not be included in the submission.

Only the scored assessments listed in the ‘LCSDS Assessment Scales’ tab in the ETOS should be submitted to LCSDS v1.0. NHS England have acquired a licence to receive data relating to these assessments or confirmed that no licence is required.

This list will remain under development and assessment tools may be added as and when identified as a requirement for submission through the LCSDS.

Please refer to the Assessment Scales tab within the ETOS for additional details on individual outcome measures including hyperlinks to each where available. It is worth noting that any Procedure codes should be flowed to the LCS202 Care Activity table.

Further information can be found on the NHS Futures webpages; MASTER LLP PLCO Combined Tool V1 Cancer Alliances Workspace you will need have a NHS Futures account to view these pages.  

• LLP (MyLungRisk) questionnaire score
• prostate, lung, colorectal, and ovarian modified 2012 6-year lung cancer risk calculator for smokers’ score

Providers and their IT suppliers are reminded of the need to ensure their compliance with Intellectual Property Law in relation to the use of copyright protected assessment tools.

SNOMED CT does not reproduce the text of the tools, so SNOMED CT values can flow to NHS England without any copyright infringement. However, reproduction of the tool, such as text, values and algorithms within IT systems requires suitable permissions to be in place. It is assumed that providers already have appropriate permissions in place for the assessment tools they use in paper form.

Permissions are required before using copyrighted assessment tools contained within the LCSDS.

The service also provides the correct versions of the individual assessment tools to use. It is a legal requirement of every organisation, including IT suppliers, to gain permission to use the copyright-protected materials.

Organisations whose local systems are not fully SNOMED CT compliant may rely on Information departments to undertake manual mapping of data to SNOMED CT terms in order to submit the data. This mapping will require review at each SNOMED CT release (6 monthly cycle), as well as when new assessment tools are introduced to or retired from the scope of the LCSDS.