Quality Improvement Week 2026: Quality data is the bedrock of robust QI

14 Sep 2026

As Quality Improvement Week (14-18 September 2026) begins, healthcare organisations across the country are coming together to share learning, celebrate success, and explore how evidence can be translated into better care for patients.

We do audit because we believe that tomorrow can be better than today” Professor Henrietta Hughes OBE, Patient Safety Commissioner (Clinical Audit Awareness Week 2026)

The week comes at a pivotal time for the NHS. The Government’s 10 Year Health Plan sets out an ambition for a health service that is more preventative, more community-based and more digitally enabled. Delivering those ambitions will require more than policy change alone. It will require a culture of robust continuous improvement. To achieve that, the healthcare sector will need high-quality data and insights that highlight what is working (and what is not), where variation exists, and where change will have maximum impact.

The key role of national data

Data from national clinical audits, clinical outcome reviews, and registries has a critical role to play in the transformation of our healthcare services. Evidence from HQIP’s programmes enables healthcare teams to understand performance, identify opportunities for improvement and ultimately achieve better outcomes for patients. As NHS services continue to evolve, ensuring that data is used not only for assurance, but also for learning and improvement, has never been more important. Indeed, there is growing recognition that its greatest value lies not simply in measuring performance, but in driving targeted improvement.

Quality improvement resources from HQIP

This week, we take the opportunity to share some of HQIP’s resources that are publicly available, to support QI in healthcare. In addition to reports and infographics from our programmes – which span a multitude of conditions – our website offers a range of resources, including guidance, case studies, benchmarking tools, and more. Find below some key resources that are relevant to QI Week.

Article: Healthcare data – the key to improvement and efficiency

HQIP’s Chair and former NHS England deputy Medical Director, Dame Celia Ingham Clark, features in BMJ Leader, sharing why clinical audit must play a key role in designing an NHS that is “Fit for the Future”: www.hqip.org.uk/news/bmj-leader-3dec25

Benchmarking data to drive QI

HQIP’s National Clinical Audit Benchmarking (NCAB) website provides an interactive visualisation of metric results from across our programmes, searchable by audit, topic, keyword and healthcare provider: www.hqip.org.uk/programmes-data/benchmarking

NHS Best practice guide: Clinical audits and registries

This guidance sets out a unified approach for commissioning and overseeing clinical audits and registries across the NHS in England and within the audit and registry community: www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/clinical-audits-registries-best-practice-guide

Article: Integrating clinical audit and quality improvement to deliver impact for patients

HQIP Associate Director, Dr Iain Smith discusses the subject of integrating clinical audit and quality improvement to deliver impact for patients: www.hqip.org.uk/news/bmjleader-ca-for-patient-impact

Clinical Audit Awareness Week resources

Designed to celebrate the critical role of clinical audit and data-driven healthcare improvement, the campaign explored how insight becomes action across five themed days, and generated a wealth of resources: www.hqip.org.uk/news-and-articles/clinical-audit-awareness-week-2026

Find out more about QI Week 2026: QI Week | The Academy of Research and Improvement