National Clinical Audit of Perioperative Care (NCAPC) Local Collaborative Leads

A Local Collaborative Lead is the named clinician at a participating organisation who helps coordinate local engagement with NCAPC. The role supports communication between the national NCAPC team and the local clinical and analytics teams in their hospital, helping to encourage participation, support data collection processes and promote local quality improvement activity. 

There should be job planned time for NCAPC Local Collaborative Leads. The time allocated should be decided locally through job planning and will depend on caseload and support available from other multi-disciplinary staff.

The role itself is voluntary, however hospitals participating in NCAPC are encouraged to identify a Local Collaborative Lead to support successful delivery of the audit locally. Having a local clinical lead supports engagement, communication and quality improvement activity.

The role can be undertaken by either an anaesthetist or surgeon with an interest in perioperative care, clinical audit and quality improvement. The most important factor is having an individual who can effectively engage multidisciplinary teams and support local participation in the audit.

The role involves acting as a local point of contact for NCAPC, supporting engagement with the audit, promoting awareness within clinical teams, helping coordinate local audit activity and supporting the use of audit findings for quality improvement. The role also includes liaison with Business Intelligence to facilitate data acquisition, local governance, audit and perioperative teams where appropriate.

The Local Collaborative Lead should be a clinician with an interest in perioperative care, audit and quality improvement. The role requires engagement with multidisciplinary teams, support for local implementation and communication with the national NCAPC programme team. The local collaborative lead should be a consultant or specialty grade clinicians with a permanent position within the hospital. 

The Lead is expected to work closely with Trust Business Intelligence and data analytics teams involved in national data submissions (e.g. HES). This includes maintaining regular engagement to validate that routinely collected and reported data accurately represents local clinical activity, patient pathways and outcomes. The role supports identification and resolution of discrepancies between administrative datasets and clinical practice to ensure robust, meaningful audit outputs.

Further details are outlined within the NCAPC Local Collaborative Lead Job Description.

The Local Collaborative Lead should work closely with multidisciplinary clinical teams, local audit departments, governance teams, perioperative leads and hospital management teams. 

A key part of the role is liaising with the Trust Business Intelligence and Data Analyst teams to support accurate data identification, extraction and transfer to the central NCAPC team. The role also includes helping disseminate NCAPC findings and reports to multidisciplinary clinical and management teams to support local quality improvement activity. 

Business Intelligence and Data Analytics teams are critical partners in the successful delivery of NCAPC. As the audit moves towards an automated data collection model, these teams will support the identification, extraction, validation and secure transfer of relevant data from local hospital information systems and routinely collected datasets. They will work closely with the Local Collaborative Lead and the NCAPC team to ensure that submitted data accurately reflects local clinical activity, patient pathways and outcomes. 

NCAPC is being designed to use a predominantly automated data collection model, drawing on routinely collected hospital and national datasets wherever possible.

Participating organisations will work with their local Business Intelligence and Data Analytics teams to identify, validate and securely submit relevant data. The aim is for data to be transferred to NCAPC secure data environment (SDE) through approved secure information governance processes, where it will be linked, quality assured, analysed and reported at national and local levels. This pseudonymised data will then be presented via a dashboard for benchmarking purposes. The aim is to minimise manual data collection burden while ensuring robust, clinically meaningful audit outputs. 

Further information will be provided on data collection methods.

NCAPC will collect information across the perioperative pathway to assess the quality, safety and equity of care for patients undergoing major elective surgery. The dataset is currently being refined through clinical, methodological and patient involvement processes but is expected to include:

• Patient demographic and clinical characteristics.

• Preoperative assessment and optimisation measures.

• Surgical procedure and perioperative management information.

• Intraoperative and postoperative care processes.

• Complications, recovery and outcome measures.

• Information required to support reporting of the NCAPC key metrics and quality improvement indicators.

The final dataset specification will be shared before routine data collection begins.

No. We are bound by HQIP to measure against 10 key metrics. While the key metrics will form an important component of NCAPC's State of the Nation reporting and benchmarking activities, NCAPC will also collect broader information to understand the organisational factors that influence perioperative care. 

In addition to patient-level clinical data, participating organisations will be asked to complete an institutional survey. This survey will gather operational, organisational and system-level information that cannot be reliably derived from routine datasets. Examples may include perioperative service configuration, workforce provision, governance arrangements, quality improvement infrastructure, access to perioperative medicine services and other hospital-level capabilities. These institutional data will provide important context for interpreting the key metrics and identifying opportunities for service improvement across the healthcare system.