Health services

Tender description

This national clinical audit of the structure, processes and outcomes of clinical care for adults undergoing emergency laparotomy in England and Wales, has been centrally funded as part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcome Programme (NCAPOP) since 2012. This contract will support the continued delivery of a national clinical audit of NHS-funded emergency laparotomy care provision and outcome in England and Wales. The successful provider will build on the successes and learning established by the audit to date. The aim of the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit for this contract period is to enable ongoing and sustained improvement of the quality and outcomes of care for patients undergoing emergency laparotomy in England and Wales. The objectives of this contract are therefore likely to include: 1— Continuing to enhance the audit's capacity to stimulate improvements in care, through: a. Identifying the specific improvements in care that audit will focus on achieving, ensuring the audit measures and outputs are structured rigorously around these measures, and that they are based on evidence-based standards and guidance wherever possible. b. Delivering effective and innovative ways of reporting results and providing information c. Ensuring maximum local benefit for the lowest possible local data collection burden. d. Improving the timeliness and frequency of publically accessible, benchmarked data. e. Spreading best practice and learning between healthcare providers f. Supporting local healthcare providers to make the best possible use of the audit data g. Highlighting key features of local service provision, planning and delivery, including where competing organisational priorities, demands and national and local incentives may act to the detriment of outcomes for these patients. h. Tailoring audit outputs for Wales to support Welsh local and national quality assurance and quality improvement initiatives 2— Continuing to work synergistically with other system and pathway-specific levers and facilitators for improvement, for example: a. Supporting the development and delivery of a possible future Best Practice Tariff for Emergency Laparotomy. b. Supporting linked national research initiatives in determining how best to accelerate the delivery of quality improvement for this patient cohort. 3— Continuing to work synergistically with other quality assurance initiatives, for example: a. Continuing to provide data to support Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections b. Publishing results on NHS Choices / my NHS c. Informing the NHS England initiative to deliver high quality 7 day services. 4— Continuing to enhance the delivery of high quality, risk-adjusted data, reflected in a dataset focussed around key improvement questions, and capable of supporting meaningful and statistically sound comparisons and benchmarking. — Scope of this National Clinical Audit. — Overall design. — Governance. — Inclusion and exclusion criteria. — Participation and case ascertainment. — Clinical dataset design. — Data capture, quality and completeness. — Data linkage. — Data analyses. — Audit outputs to enable quality improvement. — Suitable providers will need to be able to demonstrate: — Effective and fully integrated clinical leadership. — The ability to engage actively with all relevant professional disciplines. — The ability to engage actively with patient and carer groups; experience of patient and public involvement. — Robust project management skills. — Methodological and statistical expertise and experience to inform, data collection, data cleaning, analysis and interpretation of the data. — A commitment to quality improvement. — Information security /management skills including understanding/ experience of patient level data linkage and sound knowledge of information governance and procedures for gaining permissions for data processing. — Capacity and experience to successfully deliver the above requirements. — Sound economic and financial standing.