Sir Bruce Keogh’s statement on National Clinical Audit Benchmarking (NCAB)

Published: 20 Nov 2017

“Today we are launching a new way for Trusts in England to access National Clinical Audit data about their organisations.

We have long been aware that colleagues at all levels in Trusts spend a lot of time entering data to support the national clinical audits, yet the resulting information is not always being fed back in an easily accessible or useful format. Today the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) is launching National Clinical Audit Benchmarking (NCAB) which seeks to address this. Here’s the website address: https://ncab.hqip.org.uk/

We know that you value the audits as they are clinically-led and are our best way of assuring the effectiveness and safety of your services. Increasingly, the data is also being used to inform local quality improvement initiatives, commissioning and contracting decisions by NHS England and Clinical Commissioning Groups and CQC judgements.

HQIP has led a project that brought together the CQC and clinical audit leads to identify the key quality markers from their audits to help quality improvement. Each audit has picked their most important 3 to 7 measures and CQC analysts have helped develop displays and visual benchmarks to allow Trusts to scrutinise their performance in comparison to the rest of the NHS in England.

The results have been condensed down to a single downloadable PDF document for each audit, displayed on a single webpage. This immediately transforms the accessibility of the data for leaders of quality improvement at Trust level, particularly medical and nursing directors, local audit staff and relevant directorates. For each unit, instead of needing to read the entire report, they can find their key results on a single page on HQIP’s NCAB web site. For those wanting more detailed information, they will still find it in the relevant annual report of course.

This work was initially piloted in Greater Manchester and then across England. Feedback has been very positive, suggesting the platform is bringing the audit results to life in a new way. The first six specialties (vascular surgery; intensive care; upper and lower gastrointestinal cancer surgery; lung cancer treatment and hip fracture management) are now live. HQIP aims to bring the remaining national audit programme into the programme over the next year.

Please visit the website and reflect on these results and send any thoughts on how it can be improved to [email protected].”

Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director, NHS England