NLCA Data Viewer Quarterly Report October 2023
The purpose of the National Lung Cancer Audit (NLCA) is to evaluate the patterns of care and outcomes for patients with lung cancer in England and Wales, and to support services to improve the quality of care for these patients.
This data viewer provides an overview of clinical process and outcomes for patients diagnosed with lung cancer in England between January 2020 and December 2022. Please see the NLCA Data tables for detailed results on the care received by patients diagnosed in Wales in 2020 and 2021.
In England, the NLCA receives information from the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS). NCRAS collects patient-level data from all NHS acute providers on patients with cancer using a range of national data-feeds. This includes the Cancer Registration datasets and the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD). COSD data are submitted to the National Cancer Data Repository (NCDR) monthly via Multidisciplinary Team electronic data collection systems. The information held in the registration dataset is compiled from a number of sources, and clinical sign-off of data submitted to NCRAS is not mandated in England
For this quarterly report, the NLCA was provided with data from the Rapid Cancer Registration Dataset (RCRD). This dataset is compiled mainly from COSD records, and is made available more quickly than the complete cancer registration dataset. However, the speed of production means that the range of data items is limited and several standard data items in the complete registration dataset are unavailable. It also does not have complete coverage of all patients diagnosed with lung cancer in England during the reporting period. The RCRD was linked to other national health care datasets, including Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) admitted patient records, the National Radiotherapy Dataset (RTDS), the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy Dataset (SACT), and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) death register.
This NLCA report allocates patients to NHS organisations based on the “place of diagnosis” recorded within the dataset. It was not possible to allocate patients to NHS organisations based on the “site first seen”, as done in previous reports, because the RCRD did not contain this data item. The algorithm used previously to determine “site first seen” could not be used with the data supplied for this report, and we encourage NHS trusts to ensure the COSD field “place first seen” is completed to enable this approach in future.
Last updated: 12 October 2023, 7:50am