Request

1. How many individuals have been notified to the NHSBA using the Death in Service Notification Form between 9 March 2020 to 28 February 2022?

2. How many had “COVID-19” written on their death certificate?

3. How many had been confirmed to have partners?

4. Give the breakdown by Sex, by Sexual Orientation, by Professional Registration Type, by Employee International Recruitment Indicator and by Ethnic Category

Response

Question 1

We can confirm that there were 5,268 notifications for that period.

Question 4 (Partial Response)

We are able to easily provide some of the information at question 4. The number of notifications broken down by sex is as follows:

Female – 3,503 Male – 1,786

Please note that the NHSBSA does not hold information on ethnicity or sexual orientation of deceased pension members, and NHS Pension records do not have an “Employee International Recruitment Indicator”.

Question 2, 3 and the remainder of question 4 (Professional registration type)

In order to provide the information to answer questions 2, 3 and the “Professional registration type” element of question 4, we would have to interrogate the 5,268 records identified for question. We would firstly ascertain if a death certificate were held on file and then to ascertain the cause of death written on the death certificate. We estimate that it would take approximately 30 minutes per record to manually check for this data. Therefore, this part of your request will take approximately 2634 hours to complete. Furthermore, we may not hold a death certificate on file for every death we are informed of, if we are informed by the Government’s Tell Us Once service, a death certificate may not have been supplied as this information is provided with the assistance of the registrar.

Professional Registration Type - We would need to interrogate the number of files from point 1 (5,268) to ascertain if a professional registration type is held – this may not be held on all cases as NHS Pensions utilise Capacity and Employment codes rather than job titles to administer NHS Pensions, however a specific job title may be held on a form or other documentation held on a file.

We estimate that it would take up to 30 minutes to interrogate a file for the respective information detailed above (i.e. we would search for all the information above at the same time/under the one search on each case).

Therefore, I estimate that the cost of complying with questions 2, 3 and the remainder of question 4 would exceed the non-central Government limit of £450. The limit has been specified in The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 and represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours in determining whether the NHSBSA holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information. Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act, the NHSBSA is not obliged to comply with your request and I will not be processing your request further as it currently stands.

Capacity Code

Although we cannot easily provide the job title breakdown requested, our colleague in NHS Pensions has advised that it would be straightforward to provide a breakdown by capacity code. Capacity codes can be quite broad, and you can find these at the below web link:

https://www.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/sites/default/files/2020-01/Capacity%20code%20list%20-20200127-%28V5%29.pdf

If you would like to receive the breakdown by capacity code, please confirm by reply.

Please note that if I do not receive appropriate clarification of your information requirements within two months from the date of this e-mail, then I will consider your request closed.

Data Queries

If you have any queries regarding the data provided, or if you plan on publishing the data please contact nhsbsa.foirequests@nhs.net ensuring you quote the above reference. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

If you plan on producing a press or broadcast story based upon the data please contact nhsbsa.communicationsteam@nhs.net. This is important to ensure that the figures are not misunderstood or misrepresented.

The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is subject to NHSBSA copyright. This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence detailed at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Should you wish to re-use the information you must include the following statement: “NHSBSA Copyright 2022” This information is licenced under the terms of the Open Government Licence:

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Failure to do so is a breach of the terms of the licence.

Information you receive which is not subject to NHSBSA Copyright continues to be protected by the copyright of the person, or organisation, from which the information originated. Please obtain their permission before reproducing any third party (non NHSBSA Copyright) information.

Please note, this response is subject to change if clarification is received by the requester.