Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the quality of surgical outcome data collected by NHS trusts; and what steps they are taking to support NHS trusts to use that data to improve patient safety.

The National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP), is commissioned, managed, and developed by the Health Quality Improvement Partnership on behalf of NHS England, the Welsh Government, and other devolved administrations.

The programme currently consists of over 30 national clinical audits, registries, and databases as well as five clinical outcome review programmes.

The audit and registry topics include, for example, the national vascular registry, the national emergency laparotomy audit, and multiple cancer topics, all of which monitor a variety of clinical metrics including surgical outcomes.

The role of the NCAPOP is to detect unwarranted clinical variation and to feed this back to National Health Service trusts in an agile manner. Timely feedback to trusts enables them to make quick improvements to clinical practice. The NCAPOP work programme achieves this by making trust data available in near real time dynamic dashboards. The NCAPOP audits also operate a statistically rigorous outlier process with the aim of detecting negative trust outcomes. Outlier information is provided to the trust concerned, NHS England, and the Care Quality Commission.

The dashboard and outlier data can be used by trusts to influence quality governance, improve patient safety and reduce patient harm, and enable tailored clinical quality improvement programmes.