Commissioning Arrangement of the National Ophthalmology Database (NOD) Audit after 31 August 2019
1 May 2019
The Royal College of Ophthalmologists (RCOphth) was commissioned in 2014 by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) to run the National Ophthalmology Database (NOD) Audit Programme as part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP). The NOD audit collects data on cataract surgery performed in England and Wales and provides individual surgeons, healthcare providers and the public with benchmarked reports on performance, with the aim of improving the care provided to patients.
The commissioning arrangement of the NOD audit will change from 01 September 2019 as the audit funding received via HQIP, and its associated inclusion in the NCAPOP, will end on 31 August 2019. Please be reminded that the subsidised Medisoft cataract Electronic Medical Record (EMR) provision as part of the audit will cease for all sites from 31 August 2019.
The RCOphth is actively engaging with NHS England, NHS Improvement, government decision-makers and through fundraising and campaigning (#Makemydatacount) to ensure that long-term funding is secured to run the national cataract audit after 31 August 2019. The RCOphth will continue to deliver the NOD audit independently after 31 August 2019 and further information on the future arrangements of the audit will be sent in due course.
The last data extraction to occur under the HQIP contract took place in September/October 2018. The NOD audit team are currently developing the final annual report (covering 01 September 2017 – 31 August 2018) to be published under the HQIP contract. RCOphth would like to independently deliver the NOD audit after 31 August 2019 and cataract providers will have the opportunity to continue to participate within the audit. Any further data extraction and data analysis will take place outside of the HQIP contracting period and the data extraction permissions will need to be refreshed before the audit data extraction / submission in autumn 2019. HQIP and RCOphth are working to ensure a seamless transition of responsibility for the NOD audit. Part of this transition will require that healthcare providers ‘opt in’ to enable the RCOphth NOD to continue to store their historic data, some of which precedes the HQIP contract, and dates from 2010 to 2018. Please complete the form below and return to the NOD team at noa.project@rcophth.ac.uk to opt in to the RCOphth continuing to hold your historic data. HQIP will retain a copy of all analysis tables and data for archiving purposes in accordance with the Records Management Code of Practice for Health and Social Care 2016, however individual patient record-level data will be deleted by RCOphth for any unit that does not opt in before 02 August 2019.
We would like to thank you and your colleagues for your support and contributions to the NOD audit. We hope you will continue to provide data to this important project, continuing to use the outputs we provide for quality assurance, quality improvement and appraisal purposes.
If you have any questions or require further information, please feel free to contact the NOD audit team via email at noa.project@rcophth.ac.uk or telephone on 020 7935 0702.