National Clinical Audit of Psychosis (NCAP)

Programme overview

Schizophrenia affects almost 300,000 people in the UK. The National Clinical Audit of Psychosis focuses on key concerns about the treatment of people with severe mental illness including:

• access to services;
• delivery of evidence-based pharmacological and psychological therapies;
• quality of physical health care; and
• social exclusion.

The National Clinical Audit of Psychosis aims to increase the quality of care that NHS mental health Trusts in England and Health Boards in Wales provide to people with psychosis.

The following services are expected to participate in the audit:

• All NHS-funded Early Intervention in Psychosis teams in England and Wales
•  NHS-funded Children and Young People’s Mental Health/Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in England where Early Intervention in Psychosis teams do not extend their offer to Children and Young People.

For the current programme running from 2022-2025 the audit will move away from collecting bespoke audit data and will instead use routine data (e.g., MHSDS in England) which will reduce the burden of data collection on EIP teams and allow them to focus resources on patient care.

This builds on the HQIP-commissioned National Audit of Schizophrenia (NAS) (2011-15) and the Early Interventions in Psychosis project (2015-16), both delivered by the College Centre for Quality Improvement (CCQI) at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Additional information on all HQIP-commissioned projects is available on the NHS Trusts page, which includes the recommendations repository, infographics compendium, 9 month publication schedule, impact report, and National Clinical Audit and Enquiries Directory. For further information about this project, please contact the project team directly using the contact details listed in the ‘Supplier Info’ section above.

Accessing data

Data collected on behalf of HQIP by all NCAPOP projects is routinely reported and these reports are available in the ‘Related resources’ section.

For regularly updated dynamic reporting of audit data, follow the link in the HQIP Directory in the column called ‘Link to dynamic reporting’.

The reported data is also placed on the data.gov.uk website.

For details of how to apply for data that is not in the public domain, please see HQIP’s data access webpages.

Details of the contracts that HQIP awards are available at: www.gov.uk/contracts-finder.