A Broken Record

Anyone who knows me will probably be rolling their eyes at this blog.  Not this again!   Honestly can she not have a conversation without asking how things are going in planning and supporting this year’s participation in the National Diabetes Audit.  She’s like a broken record!

I hope they are saying this.  I hope it is with an indulgent smile.

So this year’s audit upload period has arrived.  From the 20th of June to the 12th of August CCGs will be working hard to support their practices to upload information to the National Diabetes Audit.

There is lots of easy to read information on what practices have to do on the NDA website.

From what practices tell me, it takes about 10 – 20 minutes to participate and this year the process has been made much easier for practices using Vision.

I get questions from CCGs and Practices about “consent”.   A letter that went out to all practices in May makes the position very clear – “The NDA has approval from the Health Research Authority Confidentiality Advisory Group, to collect patient identifiable data under Section 251."; “This means there are no legal obstacles to services participating in the NDA”.  Therefore patients do not have to be individually consented but posters should be placed in surgeries and these can be downloaded from the NDA website.

Anyone can see which practices uploaded data for last year’s audit by looking at the CVD Primary Intelligence Packs produced by the National Cardiovascular Intelligence Network.
The NDA provides an essential overview of diabetes care in England and enables high quality commissioning.  if we didn't have it we'd all end up trying to invent it.  Diabetes is one of the six priority clinical areas of the CCG Improvement and Assessment Framework (CCG IAF) and CCGs with less than 25% GP practice participation will be categorised as ‘greatest need for improvement’ due to an inability to make a reliable assessment.

I was talking to a CCG who has had 100% participation for the last 2 years.  They were excitedly telling me how impactful and helpful having robust data was to their local diabetes improvement plans but until then had not realised the value. 

I am really looking forward to having this conversation with more CCGs and Health Care Professionals.  This audit and all the tools are funded. It is so valuable. So go for it.