The National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP)
The National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) provides a single point of access to locally and nationally benchmarked NHS surgical activity and outcomes data for consultants, Medical Directors, Responsible Officers and specialty Clinical Leads. It is a free, secure online portal supporting surgical quality improvement and consultant learning and development.
The ambition is to develop NCIP into a single repository covering the whole practice of a consultant, across the NHS and private sector.
It is a resource intended to support the profession with:
- Appraisal and re-validation
- Learning and development
- Clinical governance
- Quality improvement
- Leadership and oversight
- Evidencing excellence
- Tracking innovative and HVLC procedures
- Research and audit
The metrics for key procedures have been selected to reflect practice in each specialty and include:
- Quality based, benchmarked indicators such as; length of stay, day case rates, conversion rates, readmissions, complication and revision rates and mortality.
- Diagnoses and procedures for each patient, included readmission episodes.
- Metrics for a specific diagnosis, procedure or surgical approach.
- Demographic data such as co-morbidity scores, deprivation levels and ethnicity, providing an enriched picture of population variation.
There are the 70+ orthopaedic dashboards for patients aged 17+ already available to consultant orthopaedic surgeons and 24 paediatric orthopaedic dashboards. Each dashboard has been created with the ability to filter for a particular diagnosis, sub-procedure or body region. All orthopaedics dashboards have been enhanced with metrics to indicate the presence of diabetes, obesity and inflammatory arthritis.
NCIP has the support of the BOA, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Federation of Surgical Specialty Associations.
Further details are available here.
A webinar to rollout NCIP for orthopaedic surgery was held on Thursday 22nd February. BOA President Simon Hodkinson participated; the webinar can be viewed below.