Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): key data sources

Primary care data

Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE)

The Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE) was a national data service that superseded the Practice Team Initiative (PTI) and provided general practice information to both the general public and healthcare professionals. SPIRE was a bespoke service rather than a central dataset, with aggregate data only extracted for specific purposes selected by the SPIRE prioritisation group. SPIRE was decommissioned in 2023. Public Health Scotland (PHS) is working in partnership with National Services Scotland and the Scottish Government to deliver a new primary care data extraction tool.

Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF)

The General Medical Services contract for general practices, introduced in 2004, included a voluntary Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF). Data from the QOF were published by ISD (now Public Health Scotland) up to 2015/16 when the framework was discontinued. The QOF measured achievement against a range of evidence-based indicators and includes quality indicators for COPD. The advantage of this data source is its national level of coverage; one important disadvantage is that only aggregated data are available, so that it is not possible to adjust for age or other differences when making comparisons between populations. A health board comparison of COPD prevalence using QOF data can be found in the NHS Board data section.

Until April 2006, QOF definitions did not allow patients to be on both asthma and COPD registers - thus patients with a degree of reversible airways disease were not included on the COPD register. From 2006 revised rules allowed patients to be included on both COPD and asthma registers.

The introduction of the QOF may have affected the recording of COPD in primary care. A wide range of diagnoses (using their respective Read codes) were included in the definition of COPD used to calculate QOF indicators. Since the introduction of the QOF it is likely that GPs have been careful not to use these codes unless they specifically wanted to include a patient on the COPD register.

Further information on QOF can be found on the Public Health Scotland website.

Secondary care data

Statistics on hospital admissions for COPD are held in the Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR) databases. Data from SMR01 are presented in the section on secondary care data. The overview of key data sources section of the ScotPHO website provides a summary of the SMR01 data scheme.

Mortality data

Mortality data by underlying cause of death (including COPD) are published annually by the National Records of Scotland (NRS, formerly the General Register Office for Scotland). COPD mortality data are briefly reviewed in the mortality data part of this section. Detailed statistics for individual causes of death are published by NRS in the annual Vital Events Reference tables.