Supporting consultant surgeons with their learning and development

The National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) is a free data platform that allows consultants to review their own activity and outcomes: supporting clinical quality, patient safety and learning and development.  

It provides consultants with data covering their NHS practice wherever it is performed with high-quality, specialty-specific dashboards at patient level. A large number of consultants across England are already using it. 

NCIP has been developed by clinicians, for clinicians. NCIP clinical leads, other consultants and data experts work together to create dashboards that are accurate and meaningful for each featured specialty.  

NCIP is hosted on the Model Health System platform, allowing you to move between NCIP and Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) data, and a wide range of other metrics. 

NCIP users and key use cases

• Consultants in each included specialty can see their own data benchmarked against local and national averages
• Specialty clinical leads can see data for all consultants that they are speciality lead for
• Responsible officers can see data for all consultants for included specialties that they are responsible for
• Medical directors and their delegates can see data for all consultants in their trust for included specialties

All users can also see data at provider level, and how this compares to other provider.

NCIP is only available to clinicians and is not available to any clinical or non-clinical NHS staff outside of these groups or available to the public.

Provider-level NCIP data is published on the Model Health System (MHS), included in the metrics for the specialty in question, and is available to NHS staff.

NCIP has a number of key uses which aim to support patient safety and clinical quality improvement:

• Appraisal and revalidation: provides a lever for regular usage and a mechanism for consultants to take individual responsibility for their practice based on high quality, objective data.
• Mortality/Morbidity and Clinical Audit meetings: These meetings are the key mechanism to engender improvement across the team as well as enhancing uptake.
• Clinical excellence awards: These awards allow consultants to evidence excellence. Another lever of motivation to increase uptake.
• Elective recovery: Enable consultants to take responsibility for key metrics like day case rates, cases per list, reduction in unnecessary procedures and readmissions in line with GIRFT and Model Health System to enable support for recovery from a consultant perspective
• Leadership and oversight: Embed at all levels of leadership, with enhanced access giving medical directors, responsible officers and specialty clinical leads oversight of all consultants they are responsible for.

Figure 1: NCIP Procedure Dashboard for major head/neck resection age 17+|elective

Developed by the profession for the profession - working in partnership with BAOMS to produce high quality data content

The programme is currently focusing on elective surgical specialties and has developed metrics in collaboration with the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) programme, NCIP Clinical Leads and specialty and sub-specialty associations, including BAOMS. NCIP has the full support of the Royal College of Surgeons and Academy of Medical Royal Colleges. Many NCIP trusts are now using the tool as part of the annual appraisal process.

The portal uses Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data to source consultant activity for a number of specialty procedures. Today, the NCIP portal provides access to individual’s outcomes data and unit-level data across twelve surgical specialities, with plans to increase to further surgical specialties. New data content is added every quarter and NCIP is also working to incorporate additional data sources such as clinical audit registries and private activity data into the portal.

For Oral and Maxillofacial surgical procedures, we have worked with Maire Morton, BAOMS and sub-specialty leads to identify, review and validate 20 OMFS procedure dashboards with a range of metrics hosted on a secure online portal, the Model Health System, that enables consultants to analyse and compare their clinical activity against local and national benchmarks. Metrics include volume, length of stay, day case rate and the readmission rate.

OMFS NCIP Procedure Dashboards

NCIP rollout to OMFS Units

In April 2025 NCIP commenced rollout to all OMFS units in England

To arrange your consultant access or to schedule an online demonstration of the tool, please email us