NHS Provider & Primary Care Organisation Change Signals

Detect what changed since your previous run in official NHS Organisation Data Service (ODS) provider and primary-care reference data.

What this Actor does

It downloads the official nightly ODS epraccur, epcmem, succ, and PCN core-partner reports, normalizes them by ODS organisation code, joins parent, succession, ICB and PCN information, compares the complete state with the last successful snapshot, and emits one Dataset item per meaningful change. It is intended for health-market analysts, supplier operations, data teams, and NHS ecosystem monitoring.

Signals include NEW_ORGANISATION, ORGANISATION_CLOSED, ORGANISATION_REOPENED, ORGANISATION_NAME_CHANGED, PARENT_ORGANISATION_CHANGED, SUCCESSOR_CHANGED, PREDECESSOR_CHANGED, ORGANISATION_TYPE_CHANGED, GP_PRACTICE_MERGER, PCN_MEMBERSHIP_CHANGED, ICB_ALIGNMENT_CHANGED, ADDRESS_CHANGED, and CONTACT_CHANGED. A merger signal requires an official ODS predecessor link; names or dates are never used to infer mergers. Null-to-value transitions do not become change signals.

Official source, licence, and attribution

Source: NHS England Organisation Data Service, through official Data Search and Export predefined CSV reports. ODS data is published under the UK Open Government Licence (OGL) and is openly available for use, including commercial reuse, persistent processing storage, and derived outputs subject to the licence. Attribution: Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: NHS England Organisation Data Service.

The stable key is the ODS organisation code. Data updates nightly; daily scheduling after the ODS overnight refresh is recommended.

Baseline and input

The first live run validates and stores a full snapshot and emits zero signals. Identical reruns emit zero signals. maxItems limits Dataset output only, never the snapshot. baselineOnly refreshes a validated baseline without signals. Filters are available for signal type, ODS code, organisation type, status and postcode prefix.

{"mode":"live","signalTypes":["ORGANISATION_CLOSED","PARENT_ORGANISATION_CHANGED"],"postcodePrefixes":["LS","YO"],"maxItems":100}

{"signalType":"PARENT_ORGANISATION_CHANGED","severity":"high","odsCode":"A12345","organisationName":"Example Practice","previousValue":"OLD1","currentValue":"NEW1","signalSummary":"Example Practice (A12345): parent organisation changed."}

Use {"mode":"sample"} for self-contained ADWIC examples produced by the production diff engine without changing the live baseline.

Safety, storage, and limitations

The Actor fetches all four sources, validates required columns and counts, creates Dataset output and the run summary, then commits the full snapshot last. Fetch, parse, schema, anomaly, Dataset, or summary failure leaves the previous snapshot authoritative. Storage grows with the full organization snapshot; compute is linear in source rows.

Coverage follows ODS publication scope and archive rules. GP practice rows are prescribing cost-centre records identified by official role RO76. Parent names can be unavailable in the selected reports. Succession is only recorded where ODS receives or confirms it; absence is not proof that no organisational restructuring occurred. This is change monitoring, not real-time or complete NHS intelligence.