National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre (NATCAN)

National Clinical Audit

Delivered by:

Royal College of Surgeons of England

Website:

NATCAN

Established in October 2022 as a national centre of excellence, NATCAN aims to provide regular and timely evidence to NHS services about where and why patterns of cancer care vary, and to support local quality improvement. It is the home of the ten national cancer audits in England and Wales:

Breast (primary)
Breast (metastatic)
Bowel
Kidney
Lung
Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma
Oesophago-gastric
Ovarian
Pancreatic
Prostate.

Its multidisciplinary audit teams bring together a broad range of expertise in cancer care, methodological development, data science, statistics, clinical epidemiology, performance assessment, organisation, and logistics. By bringing together all ten national cancer audits in one centre of excellence, NATCAN is able to enhance and expand the information available to the cancer care community. Learning from one cancer audit can be shared across all other projects; there is increased opportunity for wider collaboration across the cancer care community; and all audits benefit from the increased expertise available within the Centre.

NATCAN’s focus on developing a better understanding of the science of improvement, and sharing this expertise from a central hub to all audits, is vital for increasing the equity and quality of cancer care in England and Wales.

The treatment you get, how quickly you get it, and how well you are supported is subject to far too much variation across England and Wales. NATCAN is doing an exceptionally thorough job of demonstrating that. It’s our role as a clinical community to do something about it” Richard Simcock, Chief Medical Officer, Macmillan Cancer Support

NATCAN’s guiding principles are:

Use of routine national data assets to avoid the burden of bespoke data collection by NHS staff
Timely, public reporting of the process and outcomes of care at both NHS provider and regional level
Research and development to ensure fair and accurate comparisons are made between providers, and to identify reasons behind any variation in care to guide local and national quality improvement (QI) initiatives.

Supporting improvement

NATCAN’s QI programme is designed as a continuous data-driven process aimed at reducing unwarranted variation, improving outcomes, and supporting the implementation of evidence-based practice. More specifically, they:

Embed a quality improvement (QI) infrastructure across all NATCAN audits, transitioning from audit reporting to more active feedback with the rollout of QI interventions for each audit to address key clinical and data quality gaps
Support local implementation by providing practical tools including action plan templates, root cause analysis guidance, and libraries of evidence-based interventions
Bring together QI expertise from across the centre by establishing a QI Working Group, engaging with external QI experts to guide the development of audit QI interventions.

Further QI resources are available on the NATCAN website.

Additional data and resources

In addition to HQIP-published reports below, open-access, interactive data dashboards for all ten audits, updated quarterly, are available via the NATCAN website.