FOI 2026/1752

I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

I am seeking data relating to children (under 18) who are in receipt of NHS Continuing Care (also referred to as Children’s Continuing Care or NHS CHC for children) and whose care packages have undergone a transition from nurse-led delivery to health care assistant (HCA)-led delivery.

Specifically, I request the following information for the most recent full financial year available, and, where possible, the two preceding financial years:

1. The total number of children under Continuing Care whose packages were transitioned from nurse-led care to HCA-led care during each year.
2. Of those, the number whose transition was subsequently reversed — i.e., care was returned to nurse-led delivery — and the stated reasons for each reversal, in anonymised form.
3. The number of children whose transition was associated with a recorded adverse outcome, including but not limited to:
4. Unplanned hospitalisation
5. Serious incident (as defined under NHS England’s Serious Incident Framework or its successor)

• Death

4. Whether any formal reviews, audits, or investigations were conducted in relation to such adverse outcomes, and if so, the number of such reviews and their general conclusions (in summary form where full disclosure is not possible).
5. Whether your organisation holds a policy or guidance document governing the criteria by which a child’s care package may be transitioned from nurse-led to HCA-led care, and if so, the title and date of the most recent version of that document.

If you hold some but not all of the requested information, please provide what you do hold and clarify what is not held or cannot be disclosed, with reasons.

If any information is exempt from disclosure, please identify the specific exemption relied upon and confirm whether the public interest test has been considered.

I am happy to clarify any aspect of this request. Please acknowledge receipt at your earliest convenience.

Section 12(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

The Freedom of Information Act allows Public Authorities to decline to answer FOI requests when we estimate it would cost us more than £450 (equivalent to 18 hours, calculated at £25 per hour) to identify, locate, extract, and then provide the information that has been asked for.

NHS Greater Manchester (NHS GM) consists of the 10 Greater Manchester localities, Bolton, Bury, Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale, Manchester, Oldham, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan (former Clinical Commissioning Groups), who currently all have their own processes/systems for recording their Continuing Healthcare (CHC) activity, and therefore, data is held on various data bases.

As such a manual search of records would be required. It is estimated a search of each file would take approximately 15 mins and NHS GM holds hundreds of files across the 10 localities. Therefore, due to the volume and complexity of the data involved, it would require a disproportionate amount of time and resources to locate extract and collate the data, and therefore, on this occasion it is with regret NHS GM are not able to process this section of your request further.