National clinical audit data features in open access NHS Model Health System

25 Mar 2026

We are delighted to share that NHS England has prioritised national clinical audit data, commissioned by HQIP, for inclusion in their new open-access Model Health System, which has been launched this week. The inclusion of two audits in the first release, with more to come, reflects their commitment to sharing high quality data, to help professionals and public alike to understand patient care and outcomes achieved by healthcare services in England.

The NHS ‘Open Model Health System’, which can be accessed publicly without a password, is a data-driven improvement tool that is available to everyone. Based on the NHS Model Health System (MHS), which has been available to healthcare providers for some time, it supports benchmarking and enables users – including patients, carers and the general public – to view identify opportunities for improvement.

This important resource will contain aggregate level, non-disclosive data for over 20 specialties and domains, which will be added to over time. The inclusion of HQIP audits will allow users to explore healthcare performance and outcomes in a more holistic way at both system and provider level. The HQIP audit datasets that have been included in the first instance are from the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA) and the National Hip Fracture Database (NHFD). These results are replicated on HQIP’s own online benchmarking tool, National Clinical Audit Benchmarking (NCAB), which continues to be an important publicly available resource in its own right. With national clinical audit and outcome review data on a wide range of care areas – from maternity and neonatal care through to cancer and dementia – NCAB can be used for a broad overview of programme results, whereas users of Open MHS benefit from seeing national audit results in the wider context of other types of datasets relevant to each care area.

In addition to national clinical audit data, the NHS open access Model Health System (which will also become part of a new NHS England public data gateway) also provides insights on areas such as productivity and efficiency, transformation of services, and equality, diversity and inclusion – alongside wider population health and policy-related content, including GIRFT and RightCare programmes.

Getting started on the NHS ‘Open Model Health System’

The NHS offers the following advice for those getting started. The home page presents several categories to explore, laid out in a tree structure. Users can “drill down” to see further detail by navigating through the levels:

Select the organisation of interest from the top right of the screen, such as ‘Acute Trusts’ (hospitals) or Integrated Care Boards (ICBs)
Click on any tile to explore the data, or visit the Knowledge Centre on the top information bar
Read the articles in the Knowledge Centre to learn how to navigate and use the system effectively.

Useful links

Go to the NHS ‘Open Model Health System’
Watch this video to find out more about the NHS Open Model Health System
HQIP’s online National Clinical Audit Benchmarking (NCAB) tool
National clinical audit and outcome review data – in the form of reports, infographics and recommendations for improvement – from HQIP.