Health and Care Workforce Programme 2024 Launches!

The NHS Benchmarking Network have been working with NHS England over the last five years to develop a Workforce Programme to provide data and insight to support the growth and retention of the workforce across health and social care. 

Together we have worked hard to build a profile of where services are delivered, to understand the shape and size of the workforce across all sectors. We continue to build on the progress made to date, to support the achievement of the targets and ambitions recently set out in the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan

We are pleased to announce the Workforce Projects that will be included in 2024 along with  launch dates, submission deadlines and report publication timelines.  Details can be found here

Details of the specific projects will be released over the coming weeks and months.

We will continue to review and reduce the data burden wherever possible whilst still delivering against key project requirements.

At the same time as launching the 2024 Health and Care Workforce Programme we are pleased to launch the programme dedicated website.  The content will grow over the coming months as 2024 projects come online and we add project specifications and links to support from the team.

Each project page includes:

• Options to register an interest in participating in a project, links to contact the team and FAQs

• A brief project overview although more details are included within the census collection templates

• Links to walkthrough live session and videos as well as links to drop In sessions throughout the data collection period providing an opportunity to raise queries with the team

• Collection templates – locked for use for submission and unlocked for use locally.

• National report from 2023.

We will also include details of events for 2024 and news items related to the programme.

Full dates for the 2024/25 Member Work Programme are now available!

The start of the NHS Benchmarking Network’s 2024/25 member work programme is right around the corner, with 3 projects opening for registration next month! Following the release of our work programme in January, we’re delighted to provide further information for you. This additional information includes dates throughout the year for all projects, covering:

• Registration

• Data collection

• Validation

• Reporting

• Events

On our member work programme calendar, each project will now show the exact dates for each project stage, allowing members to plan and coordinate their project participation. Furthermore, the event dates will also allow you to save the date in your diary to ensure you don’t miss our highly popular Benchmarking Findings webinars! Registration for these events will open later in the year and members will be contacted when appropriate.

To ensure uninterrupted access to the member work programme, please ensure your organisation has provided a purchase order for the upcoming membership renewal. Contact Kim Burton, Network Development Manager, if you have any queries.

To download your copy of the work programme with full dates, please click here. You can find out further details about each of the 24/25 projects on the projects webpage. If you have any questions, please contact the team at enquiries@nhsbenchmarking.nhs.net

Not yet a member?

If you are from a non-member organisation, now is a great time to join to engage with the 2024/25 member work programme. We invite you to have a conversation about how the Network community can support you in achieving your priorities. Please get in touch with the Support Team to arrange this.

We're ‘Going Red’ for Heart Month!

This month we are supporting the British Heart Foundation in their Go Red for Heart Month campaign. 

The British Heart Foundation funds around £100 million of research each year into all heart and circulatory diseases and their causes. Their vision is a world without the fear of heart and circulatory diseases: “a world without heartbreak”. We'd like to help them work towards that goal! Read more about their amazing research here

What are We Doing?

On Tuesday 13th and Wednesday 14th our office will go ‘Red’, where staff will wear red. This maybe be head to toe in red, or it could be a red accessory or even just lipstick! Check out our social media to find out more!

Later this month the team will be able to take part in the BHF's free RevivR session, where staff can learn CPR in just 15 minutes.

Knowing Your Numbers

It is strongly advised that we all ‘know our numbers’. Being informed of our blood pressure is the first step in preventing heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure, to name a few. 

Anyone is able to get their blood pressure tested at your pharmacy, GP surgery or as part of your NHS Health Check (these are advised for those aged 40 - 74 every five years). Your height, weight, and cholesterol are also checked during this appointment to give a rounded view of your overall health, and the ability to give you a cardiovascular risk score. Find more avenues to get your blood pressure checked here

Find out what your numbers mean here

CVDPREVENT Clinical Audit

The CVDPREVENT audit, commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) as part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP) and funded by NHS England & NHS Improvement, aims to support professionally-led quality improvement in primary care for the prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in England. The audit is delivered by the NHS Benchmarking Network, the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities (OHID) - National Cardiovascular Intelligence Network (NCVIN) team, and NHS Digital.

CVDPREVENT is a primary care audit which automatically extracts data from 98% of the GP practices in England. This data updated quarterly provides insights into the diagnosis, monitoring, treatment and potential overtreatment of patients with and at risk of Cardiovascular diseases.

Statistics - September 2023 - present

• 1.94% of patients who were in the risk range for hypertension did not have a diagnosis, this means that over 950,000 people, in the audit sample, were not diagnosed.

• In those diagnosed 85.09% received a blood pressure test in the last 12 months, however this means that almost 1.2 million patients did not receive a test.

• In patients with diagnosed Cardiovascular diseases, 81.75% received lipid lowering therapy meaning that almost 500,000 patients did not receive lipid lowering therapy.

Find out more about CVDPREVENT and access the data and improvement tool here

The NHS Benchmarking Network are thrilled to announce a GP Benchmarking initiative!

The Independent Doctors Federation have commissioned the NHS Benchmarking Network to launch the GP Benchmarking campaign as a part of the Networks bespoke services.  This campaign tackles the updated Care Quality Commission Good Governance regulations and gives valuable insight and identifies areas for improvement.

The GP Benchmarking campaign is a unique opportunity for members of the Independent Doctors Federation to measure and improve their care and treatment outcomes.

The campaign aims to support IDF members in meeting the CQC's Regulation 17: Good governance, which was updated in August 2023. The regulation requires GP practices to monitor and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of their services. This initiative will help GP’s to do this by providing a Practice and a Patient Survey, alongside a benchmarking report that will compare results with other similar practices.

The Practice Survey covers three clinical areas: hypertension, hypothyroidism and statins. GP practices are required to provide information on the prevalence, prescribing and monitoring of these conditions in their practice. IDF members can download the full specification of the questions here and complete the survey offline. All responses will be kept confidential.

Please watch this Webinar video for more information.

The Patient Survey is designed to capture patient views and satisfaction with their GP’s own practice. It is available as a QR Code that can easily be shared with patients.

The deadline for completing both surveys is 30th April 2024.

By taking part in this campaign, GP practices will not only demonstrate compliance with the CQC regulation, but also gain valuable insights into their practice's performance and areas for improvement.

If you are not a member of IDF and you want to join this campaign, please contact their membership team to find out how to become a member. As a member, you will benefit from access to exclusive resources, events, training and networking opportunities. You will also be part of a community of professionals who share your passion for improving the private healthcare system.

If you have any questions or need any support, please email the IDF at info@idf.co.uk  

If you would like to discuss membership or bespoke services the NHS Benchmarking Network offer please contact enquiries@nhsbenchmarking.nhs.uk

Unveiling our 2024/25 member work programme

We are thrilled to introduce our member work programme for 2024/25.

The new member work programme has innovation, collaboration, shared learning and high-quality data at its heart. Whether you are an existing member or considering joining our community, we feel there is something in this work programme that will benefit you and your organisation.

Members can look forward to engaging projects, interactive events and insightful data aimed at addressing key challenges and delivering opportunities across all sectors.

Registration for the 2024/25 member projects begins from March, with data collection beginning from April. Please make sure you renew your membership so you don’t miss out.

Membership renewals
We’d like to thank each of our members for being a part of our benchmarking community in 2023/24. Our team will be reaching out to all designated Product (membership) Leads over the coming weeks. Please look out for communications from Kim Burton, Network Development Manager, including a NHSBN membership renewal letter and information on next steps.

Not yet a member?
If you are from a non-member organisation, we invite you to have a conversation about how the 2024/25 member work programme can support you. Please get in touch with the Support Team to arrange this.

Improvements to our validation process

The NHS Benchmarking Network takes pride in the quality of the data we collect from, and share with, our members. A significant part of ensuring the quality of this data is the validation process undertaken following every data collection period.

Whilst essential, this process can be complex and time consuming; both for the Network team and for participating members, and this has historically been managed via email. But 2023 saw the introduction and testing of a new approach.

For the first time, participating organisations were able to view and respond to validation queries directly via our Members’ Area through a new dedicated validations page, resulting in a smoother process for all involved, improved response rates to validation queries, and an overall improvement to the quality of data in our toolkits.

These updates were driven by user feedback, both within the team and from participating members, and are the result of a collaborative effort between the sector teams and our Development Hub.

The team continue to look for ways of improving our Members’ Area and making the process of data collection simpler for our members, and there will be more updates to come in 2024.

Accessing code sharing under the new Terms of Membership

In our ongoing efforts to provide valuable resources and tools to our members, we updated our Terms of Membership (communicated throughout August and September). The update allows opted-in submitting member organisations to access the unique identifier codes of their peers who have chosen to share data, fostering greater collaboration and insight in our benchmarking projects. 

“Show codes” feature
We are excited to introduce the “show codes” feature, which is available on the 2023 toolkit for membership projects on the members’ area. This feature provides opted-in submitting member organisation access to the unique identifier codes of other opted-in submitting members, helping you to connect, collaborate, and leverage the collective knowledge and expertise within the NHSBN community.

Who can access “show codes”?
The “show codes” button is exclusively available to users with the following permissions from an opted-in submitting member organisation:

• Product (membership) Lead

• Deputy Product Lead

• Project Lead

• Deputy Project Lead

If you hold any of these roles for an opted-in submitting member organisation, you can access the unique identifier codes of other opted-in submitting members associated with the projects your organisation participates in.

How to access
Accessing the outputs and submission codes is simple and user friendly. Follow these steps:

1. Log in to the NHSBN members’ area using your login credentials.

2. Navigate to the project output page of a project that your organisation has participated in.

3. Open the full project toolkit and select the 2023 year.

4. Look for the “show codes” button at the top of the toolkit.

5. Click on the button to reveal the list of opted-in submitting members who are connected to that specific project. Their unique identifier codes will be displayed for your reference.

This is NHSBN’s first step with code sharing between our member organisations. We understand from some members that they wish for further sharing we will explore this further. In the meantime, we hope that the feature supports members with collaboration and shared learning.

If you have any queries, please contact the Support Team.

The British Society for Heart Failure Strategic Partnership of the 25in25 Initiative

NHSBN is pleased announce its partnership with The British Society for Heart Failure (BSH)  along with PRIMIS and Strategic Intelligence Alliance in Healthcare.

The collaborative of expert partners is for the ‘discover and develop’ pilot phase of the 25in25 quality improvement implementation programme beginning early 2024. The national rollout will follow in 2025. The objective is to achieve the BSH led 25in25 ambition to reduce deaths due to heart failure by 25% in the next 25 years. This translates to over 10,000 lives saved annually.

Background
The BSH, the professional association for heart failure care in the UK, aims to increase knowledge and promote research about the diagnosis, causes, management, and consequences of heart failure amongst healthcare professionals. Their intention is to delay or prevent the onset of heart failure and improve care for patients with heart failure. To learn more, please visit: https://www.bsh.org.uk

Overview
With heart failure rates set to double by 2040, we must come together as communities to detect and treat heart failure much earlier. Hence, the aim of the pilot programme is to create a ‘dashboard’ from ‘discover and develop’ insights and data gathered from General Practice records across 4 domains;

• risk analysis,

• diagnosis,

• guideline directed medical therapy and

• quality of life measures such as mental health and wellbeing.

Partners
Announced as partners by the BSH at the inaugural meeting of selected pilot sites, NHS Benchmarking Network PRIMIS and the Strategic Intelligence Alliance in Healthcare will initially collaborate to develop the coding and tools necessary to collect the data. We will work alongside selected health systems to validate the search criteria and drive quality improvements that result in better and more equitable heart failure care. Additionally, the 25in25 programme will support improved outcomes in patients with long term conditions leading to heart failure, and to address health inequalities by tackling disparities of access, experience, and outcomes in under-served patient groups. An area that is so important to us here at the Network .

NHS Benchmarking Network (NHSBN) provides dashboards and reports for its members and delivers multiple national clinical audits, such as CVDPREVENT, and bespoke projects to support NHS planning and service improvement. NHSBN uses data tools and insight to share excellent practice through findings events throughout the year. NHSBN will be responsible for the national rollout of the dashboard to be developed from analysis of data gathered from the pilot communities.

Sarah Atkinson, Managing Director of NHSBN, commented: “NHSBN has the necessary infrastructure, expertise, and experience to deliver the national rollout of this important initiative. The data gathered at community level through this programme may also help us, in conjunction with PRIMIS, to inform and develop future indicators for audit use.”

PRIMIS, a specialist team of health informaticians within the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham, provide expert advice on the intelligent use of primary care data to the NHS, academics, and industry partners and their tools and training programmes support behavioural change in general practice, often involving the widespread scale and adoption of healthcare innovations.

The Strategic Intelligence Alliance in Healthcare (SIA4H), an experienced business intelligence team able to build complex models to help analyse available healthcare data, using a wide range of different datasets to gain insights and understanding.