Healthcare Analytics for Greater Manchester's Devolved Health System

Greater Manchester's Integrated Care System covers 2.8 million people across ten local authority areas: Manchester, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Oldham, Rochdale, Wigan, Bolton, and Bury. The ICS coordinates NHS services alongside Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) health and social care functions — the legacy of the 2016 Devo Manc devolution settlement that transferred the largest health and social care budget ever devolved in England. Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) is the largest NHS Trust in England by volume, operating ten hospital sites including Manchester Royal Infirmary, Wythenshawe Hospital, Manchester Children's Hospital, and the Royal Manchester Eye Hospital. Organisations like MFT face an analytics challenge defined by scale: millions of clinical contacts per year across diverse sites, each with distinct patient populations ranging from the urban deprivation of inner Manchester to the more affluent commuter areas of the southern suburbs.

Greater Manchester's health deprivation profile is one of the most acute in England. Salford and Rochdale — served largely by Salford Royal (part of Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust) — have health outcomes significantly worse than the national average across cardiovascular disease, respiratory illness, and life expectancy. Industrial legacy health issues — occupational lung disease, industrial injury, asbestosis — remain embedded in the older male population of former textile and engineering communities. The region also has significant asylum seeker and refugee populations in Manchester, Rochdale, and Oldham whose healthcare needs — including infectious disease surveillance, mental health trauma, and maternal health — require targeted analytical attention. Vizier's plain-English analytics interface allows GPs, community health workers, and social care staff across all ten boroughs to interrogate population health data without waiting for central analytics team capacity.

Greater Manchester ICS organisations are governed by NHS England (North West Region) in their NHS capacity, and by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority in relation to the devolved health and social care settlement. The Care Quality Commission regulates NHS Trusts and independent social care providers within the Greater Manchester footprint. The unique dual governance structure — NHS and GMCA — creates reporting obligations that span both NHS England's ICS performance framework and GMCA's own accountability reporting to the ten local authority leaders and Greater Manchester Mayor.

NHS organisations in Greater Manchester are subject to standard NHS England data standards including the Secondary Uses Service, NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, and UK GDPR obligations. The Integrated Care Partnership's Joint Forward Plan — required of all ICSs — takes on additional significance in Greater Manchester, where population health improvement targets are embedded in the devolution agreement and tracked publicly by GMCA. Quality and Outcomes Framework performance in primary care is reported at PCN and ICS level, with Greater Manchester PCNs having above-average complexity due to the high deprivation profile of many constituent practices.