NELA eNewsletter - 18th Edition March 2015
National Emergency Laparotomy Audit
Patient Data Collection
The NELA Project Team is now deep into the process of analysing the Year 1 patient data for the first Patient Report, with a number of interesting process measures and outcomes being examined. The Team is incredibly pleased with the amount of patient data submitted during last year that they have to work with and would once again like to thank all audit participants for their hard work. The data analysis has however also stressed the importance of continuing to collect complete data for Year 2 of the Patient Audit.
We would therefore once again like to encourage you to continue to enter all qualifying procedures onto the web tool and to complete the patient data when it becomes available. It is only through continuous and complete data collection that the Project Team will be able to see what affect participation in the audit is having on hospital processes and if the recommendations made in the NELA reports is resulting in an improvement to the quality of patient care delivered on a local level.
Should you wish to review the audit's inclusion/exclusion criteria to ensure that all eligible cases are being captures they can be found here.
NELA for Quality Improvement
The NELA Project Team is committed to constantly improving the way in which the audit is being conducted and ensuring that it is truly a two-way project, with valuable information being fed back to sites based on the patient data you are working hard to provide us with. In response to participant feedback and after many months of planning and design, it is with great pleasure that we are able to announce the launch of the NELA Online Web Tool Dashboard. The Dashboard is the latest addition to the NELA web tool and should now be available for all of you to view under the new 'Reports' tab.
What is the Dashboard?
The Dashboard uses the web tool patient data from cases which you've submitted to the audit and reports it back to you in ways that can be easily viewed and evaluated. From early on in the Patient Audit we have been urging local participants to take advantage of the web tool's Export function so as to begin analysing patient data. While we still feel the Export function is an invaluable asset for sites to use, we understand that analysing the data on Excel can be time consuming. The aim of the Dashboard is to begin simplifying this process.
The first phase of the Dashboard which has now been launched focuses on Case Ascertainment and Patient Demographics. The Patient Demographics section allows you to view some basic information on your hospital's population of patients undergoing emergency laparotomy, and how it compares to the audit-wide average. It focuses on characteristics such as patient age and operative urgency.
The Case Ascertainment side is a tool we're very much hoping will help in the process of getting cases completed and locked. It gives you a detailed list of all incomplete cases, along with each case's date of admission, completion percentage and highlights the individuals who are responsible for completing it. It also allows you to see during which months the most amount of cases were entered, thus giving you the opportunity to see how you're doing in the data collection process now compared to previous months.
The next phase of the Dashboard will focus much more heavily on Quality Improvement, feeding back key QI indicators and comparing your hospital's data with national audit-wide averages. We are currently in the process of developing the QI dashboard and hope to make further additions for you to use in the lead up to the release of the first NELA Patient Report in July 2015.
A detailed user guide outlining how the Dashboard can be accessed and ways in which it can be used to display and analyse data can be found here.
Upcoming Events Featuring NELA Speakers
The following events will also feature members of the NELA Project Team speaking about and answering questions on the audit:
• Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI) Core Topics Conference
25 March 2015, Newcastle
Dave Murray (Clinical Lead) Speaking
• Association of Surgeons of Great Britain and Ireland (ASGBI) Core Topics Conference
22-24 April 2015, Manchester
Emma Barrow (Surgical Fellow) Speaking
• Royal College of Anaesthetists (RCoA) Spring Symposium
14-15 May 2015, Edinburgh
Dave Murray (Clinical Lead) Speaking
• Age Anaesthesia Association (AAA) Annual Conference
14-15 May 2015, Manchester
Matt Oliver (Research Fellow) Speaking
• Evidence Based Peri-Operative Medicine (EBPOM) Annual Congress
29 June - 3July 2015, London
Dave Murray (Clinical Lead) Speaking
• Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland (AAGBI) Annual Congress
22-25 September 2015, Edinburgh
Dave Murray (Clinical Lead) Speaking
Additional Useful Tools on NELA Website
• Participant Manual - A compilation of all useful NELA background information and documents, the perfect introductory tool for a hospital user new to the audit
• Audit Protocol Document - Provides an outline on the structure of the audit, as well as all professional stakeholders involved
• Outlier Policy - Sets out the process by which participating hospital performance will be assessed and the process the NELA Project Team will follow to manage any hospital that is found to fall outside the expected range of performance and therefore flagged as an outlier
• Organisational Audit Action Plan - Provides an action plan to assist hospital sites in ensuring they are meeting all recommendations laid out in the NELA Organisational Report
• Set of Slides - A PowerPoint presentation focusing on the key findings of the NELA Organisational Report and how the report strongly emphasises the need for patient data to be collected and analysed
• Top Tips - List compiled of some of the most useful and effective advice that was sent into us by a number of the top performing NELA sites
• Frequently Asked Questions - Constantly updated FAQs reflect the most common and recent queries we receive from hospital staff and web tool users
• Help Box Text - Provides additional assistance for filling in each of the data collection questions and can also be found on the web tool by clicking on the 'H' button to the right of every question
• Proforma - A PDF copy of the latest Proforma, the online data collection questionnaire, that can be printed and filled out with patient information in real time, making it then easier to transfer all the information onto the online web tool
• Updated Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria
• NELA Poster & Leaflet - To publicise the audit amongst staff and patients in the hospital
• OPCS Labels - For procedure items in the NELA dataset
• Process Outcome Measures
• Organisational Audit Link to Standards
Certificate of Participation
To receive your copy of the NELA Certificate of Participation please contact your hospital's Local Administrator to request that a certificate be issued for you.
Organisational Audit Report
To download a copy of the full NELA Organisational Report as well as the Executive Summary please click here.
Sign up to receive the NELA newsletter
The NELA project team will be regularly publishing a newsletter informing those interested and/or participating in the audit on the latest developments.
If you would like to receive the newsletter for regular updates please sign up to the mailing list here.
NELA Twitter
The National Emergency Laparotomy Audit has launched its own twitter account. This will provide updates, news and links to important information on the NELA website. You can follow us @NELANews
Key dates
• Complete: Organisational audit
• Jan 2014: 1st year of data collection for patient audit commenced
• May 2014: Organisational Audit Report published
• Dec 2014: 2nd year of data collection for patient audit commences
• July 2015: 2nd Report Published (1st patient audit)
Contact info:
If you have any questions or would like to contact the project team email - info@nela.org.uk
