TDI Guidance

Note: guidance originally posted March 2025.

NHS England’s current standardisation landscape includes different sets of reference data codes to identify ethnicity across several data products, pipelines, datasets and information standards.

NHSE and DHSC are working in a joint programme on recommendations to improve data around protected characteristics including the way ethnicity is identified in NHS data. This work is still ongoing and as it continues there is a need to align approaches as far as possible on the identification of ethnicity in health and care to avoid further divergence and lack of clarity.

In parallel, the Government Statistical Service (GSS) is currently working on a new iteration of the harmonised ethnic group question design, with a view of establishing a new harmonised ethnicity standard. This will also inform future Census questionnaires. Findings are to be published soon giving an indicative timeframe for this standard to be published in December 2025.

Accordingly, to address the existing guidance gap NHSE is recommending that if the design of a new product cannot wait until the joint DHSC and NHSE-led standards are published, it should make use of latest ethnicity standard which is Census 2021 ethnicity codes. This follows the GSS Standardisation recommendation.

If you are currently using any other ethnicity codes in an existing implementation, we recommend that you do not make any changes for the time being until the GSS guidance is published. However, we do recommend that you familiarize yourself with the ethnicity groupings defined by Census 2011 and 2021, as these will be mappable to any new standards developed by GSS.

This guidance will remain in place until new recommendations are published, and work can be completed to develop information standards that constitute official policy and as such will establish a longer-term solution. Note that this advice is intended as best-practice guidance for anybody in the NHS seeking clarification on which ethnicity codes to use for their data products and does not constitute official policy.