National Diabetes Inpatient Safety Audit (NDISA) information for hospitals

The NDISA audit measures the frequency of avoidable inpatient diabetes harms.

The NDISA audit is part of the National Diabetes Audit (NDA) programme commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) and managed by NHS England, in collaboration with Diabetes UK. The audit measures what is the frequency of the 4 harms in secondary care inpatients. The NDISA is open to all inpatients with diabetes, aged 17 and over, at acute secondary care hospitals in England and Wales.

Who should participate

All secondary care NHS acute hospitals in England and Wales are eligible to participate.
Registration is at trust level not hospital level.
Participation in the NDISA is a requirement in the NHS standard contract for acute hospitals with inpatient services.
It forms part of your trust's quality accounts.
NDISA is an NCAPOP audit and will be listed in the Quality Accounts Resource.
The audit forms part of the mandated quality accounts, there is no funding available for units taking part.

Submitting data

Data for each harm should be collected by completing an NDISA Data Collection Form or by direct entry into the Clinical Audit Platform (CAP). Data collection forms are available to download from the NDISA website.
Once the form has been completed, it will need to be submitted online using the NDISA secure web portal.
The NDISA audit is a continuous data collection; you can enter data at any time but ideally harms should be entered in the same calendar month. If you miss the end of the month deadline, please enter the data as soon as possible. Trusts can check their submissions and verify any months where zero harms occurred.
All healthcare professionals who are involved in managing inpatients with diabetes can fill in the data collection form. Whoever completed the form should record their name in the relevant section to ensure you can follow up any queries with the right person locally as you are entering the data online.
Data collection form(s) should be kept securely in line with Caldicott principles. Please contact your local Caldicott Guardian or information governance team for further information on secure data storage and time periods for keeping. Once the data has been entered there is no obligation to retain the forms unless the hospitals information governance policy requires it.
Trusts can check their submissions and verify any months where zero harms occurred.
All instances of qualifying harms must be submitted.
An extract report, to download all data submitted by your trust, is available at the time of launch. The report(s) can be found under the reporting tab within the Clinical Audit Platform when they are available. This only includes the NDISA data entered using the secure web system

Research and ethics

NDISA is an audit; therefore it does not require NHS Research Ethics Committee (REC) approval. Section 2.3.12 of the Department of Health and Social Care document Governance Arrangements for Research Ethics Committees Document (harmonised version) excludes clinical audit from REC approval. Data collected for clinical audit must adhere to the Health Research Authority (HRA) framework which includes ethics and confidentiality. The NDISA information leaflet has undergone the information governance assurance process and meets the HRA requirements for clinical audit.

All trusts with acute diabetes inpatient services in England are expected to participate in the audit.

NDISA information for research

All research being conducted using NDISA audit data will fall in line with the aims of the audit. For example, research may look at how services can be improved to improve the care received by inpatients with diabetes. All applications for data are assessed by the National Diabetes Audit Executive Board to ensure that the research aims and methodology are clinically and statistically sound, and that the correct legal permissions are in place before permission is given to share the data.

Information for participants

The audit provides an information leaflet for participants along with an information sheet containing the data items collected. These are available to download.

You should display the leaflets in the inpatient packs for patients with diabetes and the patient information poster should be displayed.

If a participant would like to withdraw from the audit

Participants may choose to withdraw from the audit at any time. The patient should inform their clinician, and the clinician should ensure that no further data on the patient is entered into the clinical audit platform and delete any records already present.

Further enquiries regarding opting-out should be emailed to [email protected].

Learn more about the data items collected

Further information about the data collected is available from the implementation guidance.

The data items collected will allow the NDISA audit to look at the standards of care provided to inpatients with diabetes.

ARTICLE

Data collection

The National Diabetes Inpatient Safety Audit (NDISA) forms part of the National Diabetes Audit (NDA). It provides a list of the items for data collection, including mandatory fields and in-built validations in the clinical audit platform.

Can NHS England use the data collected for the NDISA audit for other purposes

NHS England will only use the NDISA data for audit purposes to look at improving care for inpatients with diabetes. Anonymised information about inpatients with diabetes may be collected by the NDISA audit and held securely by NHS England and used for research to improve NHS healthcare delivery. There are strict data confidentiality controls in place to protect participant data and any research must be in line with the audit aims and have been through NHS England’s data access process to ensure that the legal permissions are in place to allow the sharing of the data.

Data linkage

All data must be submitted using the online portal. Once submitted, the data may be linked with data from the core National Diabetes Audit (NDA), Patient Episode Data for Wales (PEDW), Hospital Episode Statistic (HES) data, and mortality data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). This combined data will be used to produce the reports. Linkage is undertaken to help reduce the burden on data collection of services. The data linkage is in line with audit aims to improve outcomes for inpatients with diabetes.

Contact us

For further information or general enquiries, including queries regarding data collection and submission, please email the NDISA team or our national service desk at [email protected] or telephone 0300 303 5035.

Last edited: 28 June 2024 2:04 pm