What we are doing
The National Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Audit Programme for England and Wales comprises a number of ambitious audit workstreams, combined with an extensive partnership approach and comprehensive multidisciplinary, collaborative working.
On 1 March 2018, adult and paediatric asthma were added to the COPD audit programme when the National Asthma and COPD Audit Programme (NACAP) was launched.
The core aim of the programme is to drive improvements in the quality of care and services provided for COPD patients. Through collecting and linking patient journey data it will enable the comparison of performance and practice, highlight variations in patient care and outcomes, and seek to innovatively drive up standards of patient care.
The audit programme comprises five key workstreams:
- Primary care audit – collection of audit data from GP patient record systems.
- Secondary care continuous audit – continuous audit of admissions to hospital with COPD exacerbation (began on 1 February 2017).
- Pulmonary rehabilitation snapshot audits – snapshot audits of service delivery and quality (took place in the first half of 2017).
- Organisational snapshot audits - snapshot audits of the resources and organisation of COPD services in secondary care and pulmonary rehabilitation (they took place in the first half of 2017).
- Pilot data linkage – a pilot piece of work looking at linking the data across the patient journey.
The National COPD Audit Programme supports the Department of Health’s aims to improve the quality of services for people with COPD, measuring and reporting the delivery of care as defined by guidance standards. The programme has quality improvement integrated into all its workstreams, and hosted an event in July 2016 on moving to continuous data collection and sharing quality improvement initiatives. It also hosted a series of quality improvement workshops in 2017.
What we have done
The National COPD Audit Programme was commissioned in 2013, and has also worked on the following outputs:
- Secondary care snapshot audit – snapshot audit of admissions to hospital with COPD exacerbation (2014).
- Pulmonary rehabilitation snapshot audit – snapshot audits of service delivery and quality (2015).
- PREM – 1-year development work exploring the potential/feasibility for Patient Reported Experience Measures to be incorporated into the programme in the future.