NCIP
The National Consultant Information Programme
An introduction from Professor Sir Norman Williams, Programme Chair of NCIP, Emeritus Professor of Surgery and former President of the College of Royal Surgeons.
Welcome to the National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP). NCIP provides access to rich objective activity and outcomes data via a free, secure online portal supporting surgical quality improvement and consultant learning and development.
This unique service provides a single point of access to locally and nationally benchmarked NHS surgical data for consultants, Medical Directors, Responsible Officers and specialty Clinical Leads.
The ambition is to develop NCIP into a single repository covering the whole practice of a consultant, across the NHS and private sector.
How NCIP can support you?
NCIP is a versatile tool that can be applied to different aspects of your role, whether that’s as a consultant, Medical Director, Responsible Officer or Clinical Lead, NCIP can support you with:
- Appraisal and re-validation
- Learning and development
- Clinical governance
- Quality improvement
- Leadership and oversight
- Evidencing excellence
- Tracking innovative and HVLC procedures
- Research and audit
Clinically led
A founding principle of NCIP is that it is a resource for the profession, led by the profession. The programme’s consultant Clinical Leads work in partnership with GIRFT, specialty associations and sub-specialty associations to develop content in the portal. NCIP has the support of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the Royal College of Surgeons and the Federation of Surgical Specialty Associations as a tool that can support consultant learning and development.
Portal content
The metrics for key procedures have been carefully chosen by NCIP Clinical Leads to reflect practice in each specialty. Once logged in to the portal, you can expect to:
- View quality based, benchmarked indicators such as; length of stay, day case rates, conversion rates, readmissions, complication and revision rates and mortality
- View diagnoses and procedures for each patient, included readmission episodes
- Apply filters to view metrics for a specific diagnosis, procedure or surgical approach
- Demographic data such as co-morbidity scores, deprivation levels and ethnicity, providing an enriched picture of population variation
Content is available to view now for the following specialties:
- ENT
- General surgery – Upper GI and Lower GI
- Gynaecology
- Neurosurgery
- OMFS
- Orthopaedic surgery
- Paediatric surgery
- Spinal surgery
- Thoracic surgery
- Urology
- Vascular surgery
- Cardiology and cardiac surgery are in development and will be included in a future phase of content release.
The latest NCIP portal developments
- The portal has now been integrated into the Model Health System. Allowing you to view GIRFT and NCIP metrics on the same platform.
- The new ‘Clinical Lead’ profile is live, supporting Clinical Leads in their leadership and service management responsibilities.
New content for Q3 2023
- Urology content has been refined as part of significant development work for this specialty;
- addition of Holmium laser enucleation of the prostate (HoLEP),
- a refined complication metric for prostatectomy for cancer,
- a metric to indicate reoperation within 6 months – 2 years for PCNL and ureteroscopy.
- Mortality within 1 year added to cancer dashboards.
- Enhancements to content for ENT, gynaecology, OMFS and spinal surgery
- New content for neurosurgery and orthopaedics, paediatric surgery and vascular surgery
Supporting elective care recovery
The NCIP portal assists the GIRFT High Volume, Low Complexity (HVLC) programme by providing dashboards for specific HVLC procedures across 30+ specialty pathways. Helping to track the delivery of these pathways at an individual and unit level.
Data sources
Content is developed from readily available and routinely collected sources. The primary data source is Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), content is pseudonymised at individual level and refreshed every quarter. The NCIP content development team is also working on incorporation of trust theatre data, clinical audit and registries’ data to enhance the data tool.
- Access the portal – existing users only
- Webinar
National Consultant Information Programme: new look, new features
24th October 2023
Sir Norman Williams, chair of NCIP, and Andrew Dickinson, NCIP clinical lead for urology and chair of BAUS Audit Committee, hosted this webinar and gave an overview of the new features and the improved data insights of the NCIP portal. Aimed at urologists, this webinar demonstrates how NCIP can support consultant urologists in appraisal, revalidation and quality improvement.
- How NCIP can help you
- How to register
The portal can only be accessed by individual consultants, Responsible Officers, Medical Directors (and their delegates) and specialty clinical leads via a personal login. Individual consultant data will not be available for external publication.
Due to low number suppression for confidentiality reasons, you will be eligible for access to the portal once you have completed 6 or more of any procedure that NCIP covers. We are working to remove this requirement.
If you would like to activate your account, please email the team at england.ncip@nhs.net
- How to videos
Carrie MacEwen
