We support quality improvement
The National Diabetes Audit (NDA) describes the care and outcomes achieved in diabetes care in England and Wales. The NDA identifies opportunities for improvement.
The Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership commissions national audits in England and states that “...healthcare providers require additional support to make the best use of performance feedback data. This is likely to be most effective as part of a coordinated regional or national improvement programme.” View the HQIP report.
Different audit providers have delivered this support in different ways, for example, through educational materials, webinars, quality improvement collaboratives, training to use plan-do-study-act cycles, asking teams to make a formal commitment and/or preparing patients to be active participants in their care.
What are we working on now?
- Providing dashboards to enable NHS organisations to assess local practice against NICE guidelines, review outcomes and drive service improvement. At a systems level, the dashboards help commissioners identify gaps.
- Enabling organisations and systems to compare their care and outcomes with similar NHS organisations, to help interpret the data.
- Writing patient-friendly summary reports that explain audit findings and recommendations.
- Seeking feedback on the audit dashboards, through the blue button at the bottom of the dashboards.
- Developing videos to support use of the dashboards. For example, Using Diabetes Data For Improvement
- Monitoring improvement in care, outcomes and audit participation. We engage with stakeholders, including through relevant local and national diabetes meetings and conferences, to:
- increase clinical audit participation
- promote the use of outputs of the work streams to inform local quality improvement programmes and service organisational improvement
- support identification of the future focus for improvement and develop resources to support quality improvement.
- Running Do One Thing (DOT) campaigns, to draw attention to opportunities for improvement identified within the NDA data.
- Organising regional and national activities and events to support improvement and encourage participation in the audit and quality improvement work streams. These webinars are planned in line with key moments in NHS England policy or NDA reporting, such as the release of a new dashboard.
- Delivering Quality Improvement Collaboratives (QICs) to support NDA feedback recipients to implement improvements:
- the current priority from the National Diabetes Audit is to support the use of insulin pumps, including as part of hybrid closed loop systems, in line with NICE guidance. We invited all specialist teams in England and Wales to take part and 83 applied. We are coming to the end of the first wave of 39 teams and are preparing to deliver a further wave later in 2024. Email NDA@Diabetes.Org.UK if you would like to know more and /or to join this second wave.
- we have previously delivered Quality Improvement Collaboratives on a range of topics including in-patient, pregnancy in diabetes and footcare
Have a look at our Health Improvement Plan to find out more.
View your data
You can view the NDA dashboards for more information to understand more about your services; to see how they compare nationally, regionally and local and to help you create an improvement plan.
If you have feedback, suggestions or questions about our work to support improvement, or improvement lessons to share with others, please email us at nda@diabetes.org.uk
