PCCIU Background

PCCIU Background

The Primary Care Clinical Informatics Unit (PCCIU) was founded in 1999 to provide a reporting service to Scottish General Practice in collaboration with Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Scotland as part of their Clinical Effectiveness Programme to collect Practice data and to produce SPICEpc reports to Practices, Community Health Partnerships (CHPs) and Health Boards for the SPICEpc project. PCCIU collected Practice data for the SPICEpc Programme bi-annually in spring and autumn between 2000 and 2011. The collected data for each season was amalgamated to a single seasonal general practice database. Each seasonal database contains all data recorded into GPASS up to the date of extraction from the Practice. All our seasonal databases can be used to provide datasets to PCCIU approved researchers.

Between May 1996 and September 2000 a Monthly Bulletin was sent to Practices. These were for specific clinical topics,  based on data collected from Practices by the Electronic Questionnaire (EQ) software. During this period, The GPASS Data Evaluation Project (GDEP) conducted three National surveys on the state of computerisation in Scottish Primary Care.

PCCIU was formerly known as the GPASS Data Evaluation Project (GDEP). GDEP was founded in 1987 to determine the level and range of usage of GPASS by Practices. GDEP developed the Electronic Questionnaire software to collect anonymous patient clinical and registration data to Aberdeen for analyses. All practices' results were collated and various reports were produced and issued to Practices and Health Boards.

Between 1994 and 1995 GDEP developed a prototype of a standardised Practice Health Profile to allow Practices to compare their own health needs and performance with similar data from local, regional and national sources. The prototype was implemented and tested in two pilot Grampian Practices. In this period, GDEP also developed two searching programs, Practice Reports Utility (PRU) and Practice Analysis Tool (PAT) to provide fast searching on the GPASS system.

In 1993 GDEP initiated the Continuous Morbidity Recording project, supported by ISD (Information and Statistics Division, National Services Scotland). This project recruited about 60 Practices, throughout Scotland, representing most types of locality and deprivation. Every clinical encounter was recorded into GPASS with a suitable Read code and an indication of first, recurrent or new. GDEP recruited the Practices and developed a data collection system and processing for its first years. This Project is now called Practice Team Information (PTI), operated by ISD.

Find out more about the data we collected, visit the PCCIU Data page.