THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER: The Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN) is a non-commercial organisation affiliated with the University of Manchester and funded by membership fees from participant trusts.

Data-sharing agreement from NHS Digital registers of approved data releases, 2014–2019. Evidence status: source reported.

Organisation: The University of Manchester
Source reference: DARS-NIC-326033-G1P7Q-v2.2
Jurisdiction: England
Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0, subject to NHS England terms and exclusions

Register reference: DARS-NIC-326033-G1P7Q-v2.2
Agreement period: not published to no end date published
For commercial purposes (as marked in the register): Not stated
Release files listed by NHS England: 12

Data approved

Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care

Objective, as published

The Trauma Audit and Research Network (TARN) is a non-commercial organisation affiliated with the University of Manchester and funded by membership fees from participant trusts. TARN is the mandated organisation for the audit of trauma care in England, as set out in and endorsed by Standard ISB 1606. TARN holds Europe's largest database of traumatic injury, with hospitals within participating trusts entering details of relevant cases into TARN’s online system. Any trusts receiving trauma patients are participants. The aim of TARN is to support service improvement by providing analytical feedback to trusts, in reports such as the major trauma dashboards. TARN is the means by which funding mechanisms such as Best Practice Tariff operate. The TARN site hosts the Best Practice Tariff report, which major trauma centres use to report to commissioners and receive payment. To ensure that analyses are as accurate as possible, TARN needs to ensure that its dataset is as complete as possible. TARN requires HES data in order to measure completeness of submission to the TARN database for individual trusts and hospitals. Trusts are fed back results for their individual trust and information on completeness for all trusts is also displayed on TARN’s website. HES data helps TARN to help trusts ensure that all cases that are eligible for payment are submitted and can be reported on.

Expected benefits, as published

The ultimate aim of TARN is to improve patient care. TARN carries out a number of planned and ad hoc analyses for hospitals and trusts to highlight good performance and areas where performance could be improved. A key element of TARN’s work is analysing rates of survival to identify hospitals with excess deaths, based on injury and demographic profiling. This work is dependent on the quality/accuracy of information emanating from the trusts so the use of HES data to monitor and improve completion rates contributes towards this overall aim. Using HES data to calculate data completeness assists in determining whether apparent poor performance is related to poor data collection, or whether other issues exist that need to be examined further. Using the HES data allows TARN to derive a denomin…

Source: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/2019/http://content.digital.nhs.uk/media/23861/Release-Register-December-16---February-17/xls/Release_Register__December_16_-_February_17.xlsx. Captured 2026-10-30.

Limitations: Agreement as recorded in an NHS Digital register of approved data releases (2014–2019), retrieved from the UK Government Web Archive. That register lists releases made in its period and the agreement's purpose statement as it then stood; it gives no agreement dates, and the agreement may have changed since. Imported only where a paper quotes a reference no current register holds.