Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme (SSNAP)

National Clinical Audit

Delivered by:

King’s College London

Website:

Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme

The Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme (SSNAP) is the national healthcare quality improvement programme for England, Wales, and Jersey, and additionally funded by the Northern Ireland Government. It measures both the quality and organisation of stroke care across these regions. It is the single source of comprehensive national stroke data, capturing over 95% of UK stroke cases.

SSNAP audits the entire stroke pathway – from prehospital care to hyperacute and inpatient treatment to community and rehabilitation services – against evidence‑based national standards, enabling services to benchmark performance, track improvements, and identify areas needing change. It provides timely, transparent information to clinicians, commissioners, patients, and the public to support improvements in stroke care.

Why SSNAP is important / impactful:

Provides the only national, validated dataset spanning the entire stroke pathway
Enables services to monitor performance, plan QI activity, and demonstrate improvement
Drives national policy and service configuration changes
Supports equitable, evidence‑based care by identifying variation and gaps in provision.

One of our key goals is to make sure more patients can access the full specialist stroke pathway, as this leads to better recovery and outcomes.” SSNAP State of the Nation Report 2025

Supporting improvement

SSNAP supports quality improvement by providing the most comprehensive, standardised stroke care data across England, Wales, Jersey and Northern Ireland, offering timely reports and benchmarking that help teams identify gaps, monitor progress and plan evidence‑based changes. It supplies tools, case studies, methodological guidance and research resources to help services translate data into action, while empowering patients through transparent information and supporting clinicians in advocating for better care.

SSNAP supports quality improvement by:

Measuring and benchmarking stroke care
Providing regular, high‑quality data for rapid feedback
Highlighting unwarranted variation and supporting action
Equipping clinicians with tools and evidence to test and implement change
Enabling research that advances understanding of stroke care
Empowering patients through transparency
Driving national consistency in stroke care delivery.

Additional data and resources

In addition to HQIP-published reports below, SSNAP provides monthly, quarterly and annual reports, dashboards, and key indicator scores at team, regional and national levels, that show how well teams are performing against national standards. Further information can be found on the SSNAP website.