5 Years of ERIC on Line

Estates Return Information Collection (ERIC)

“ERIC enables the data collection and analysis of Estates & Facilities information from NHS Trusts, Foundation Trusts with independent status and Primary Care Trusts in England.

It is a compulsory requirement that NHS Trusts submit an Estates Return. This is so we can provide an indication of the status of Estates & Facilities services in the NHS for the Department of Health.

The development of the Priority and Planning Framework and new Standards for Better Health has led to the data now being used to inform a set of indicators to assess the performance of a Trusts Estates and Facilities Services. Over time these will permit Trusts to demonstrate year-on-year improvement.”

The above is from the Department of Health web site; it describes a data collection exercise that was once regarded as a task with little benefit to those providing the data and which is now seen as a fair exchange for access to a large amount of extremely useful and relevant NHS Trust management information.

In 2000 the Healthcare Facilities Consortium Benchmarking Club was exploring the potential for a Web based data collection system with Asckey Data services Ltd. This “proof of concept” work then became an intensive three month web development and deployment in exercise in early 2001, ERIC on Line has since become one of the most extensive data collection exercises undertaken by the Information Centre and one whose data is relied upon by many NHS related organisations as a source of good statistics on the NHS “estate”.

The ERIC system continues to be a mandatory return for many NHS Trusts, with refinements to the data collected made on an annual basis.

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