All records within ODS organisation, site and practitioner data include the date on which the record was last changed in a substantive way, as part of the Organisation/Practitioner component.
‘Substantive Change’ is defined as any previously existing value being displaced by a new one within any data item that is exposed to users; or, the addition of any new item that was not previously present in the published record. Brand new records will bear the date of their creation in ODS.
LastChangeDate is not the ‘effective’ date for a change. Elements of the ODS record carry their own operational and legal start/end dates (the overarching org record, roles and relationships), legal start dates may be in the future.
The date published in the LastChangeDate element can be used by consumers to filter amended records.
ODS Future Date Checker
It is feasible to have a record returned by the API with a LastChangeDate equal to the date on which the query is run. This is due to an ODS pre process that runs at midnight to check for any future start/end dates within the data that have just elapsed. If found, the process will update the LastChangeDate for these records to enable consumers to identify / reflect these updates (i.e. the Status changes from Active to Inactive etc).
The future date checker runs every night at midnight before the daily upload to the API is sent, hence why records found by the future date checker will have an LastChangeDate of 'today'.
Link to Technical Guidance re querying with the LastChangeDate parameter.