The challenge
South Durham Health CIC (SDH) was requested to provide amputation rate data for patients with diabetes at the Easington Locality Diabetes meeting on 1st April 2025. Nationally published Diabetes data is available, however, it is not timely enough (latest update was November 2024) and it does not include amputation rates anyway.
The challenge was then to source timely and accurate data that could be drilled down to PCN and Practice level to enable in depth analysis.
Our response
SDH has access to RAIDR, a business health intelligence tool that collates primary and secondary care data on one platform and is updated monthly. A representative from the Federation contacted the RAIDR team to see if hospital admission and amputation data was available for patients with diabetes at a local level.
The RAIDR team confirmed that the information required was available in their Patient Activity dashboard and advised which codes to search for in the primary diagnosis filter. The use of their Primary Care dashboard was also recommended to view diabetic rates per practice across the PCN for benchmarking.
The PCN then undertook a further investigation into amputation rates for diabetic patients utilising the data readily available via the dashboard.
Outcomes
The Federation used the Primary Care dashboard to provide insight into the number of diabetic patients for each practice and to identify any outliers.
A search for patients admitted to hospital for diabetic-related amputations was then carried out utilising the Patient Activity dashboard and exported to excel. The patient numbers were then compared between both sets of data to identify patients with a clinical diagnosis of diabetes who have had an admission for amputation.
This filtered data was then recalculated in excel to provide the amputation rate per 1000 diabetic patients in preparation for the locality meeting.
Analysing the weighted population rates alongside the amputation data, a few outliers were identified across South Durham.
Easington Locality will then look to work alongside the practices identified to improve patient outcomes going forward and to explore opportunities to engage with patients directly. This could improve self-management of the condition and avoid future exacerbations which could in turn lead to amputations.
“Currently, there are no other data sources available within our region that provide us with the analytics and insight to view amputation rates for our diabetic population. RAIDR has proved invaluable and will be pivotal to future projects.”