Table 1.
Description of the two national clinical audits
| National Diabetes Audit (NDA) [5] | |
| The NDA Programme comprises four modules: the National Diabetes Core Audit, the National Pregnancy in Diabetes Audit, the National Diabetes Footcare Audit, and the National Inpatient Diabetes Audit. The NDA helps improve the quality of diabetes care by enabling participating NHS services and organisations to assess local practice against the NICE guidelines (e.g. the proportion of eligible patients with diabetes that achieve target levels of blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar), compare their care and outcomes with similar services and organisations, identify gaps or shortfalls that are priorities for improvement, identify and share best practice, and provide comprehensive national pictures of diabetes care and outcomes in England and Wales. Audit reports provide national- and local-level information on, for example, prevalence, care process completion, and treatment target achievement. Our study focused on the quarterly release of data included in the Core Audit. | |
| Trauma Audit Research Network (TARN) [7] | |
| TARN is the National Clinical Audit for traumatic injury and is the largest European Trauma Registry, holding data on over 800,000 injured patients including over 50,000 injured children. TARN aims to measure and monitor the processes and outcomes of care (e.g. the proportion of patients with head injury receiving a CT scan within 60 min) to demonstrate the impact of trauma networks, providing local, regional, and national information on trauma patient outcomes, and thereby help clinicians and managers to improve trauma services. Individual patient data are inputted manually at the trauma unit to an online data collection and validation system, aiming to be available within 25 days of patient discharge or death. Our study focused on the online, ‘TARN Analytics’ tool: a reporting tool designed to offer users a more dynamic method of viewing and manipulating their data, e.g. by supporting the creation and sharing of data visualisations. |