The National NNHLA Audit (NNHLA) determines whether the care received by people diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in England and Wales is consistent with current recommended practice and provides information to support healthcare providers, commissioners and regulators in helping improve care. The NNHLA reports a set of process and outcome measures that cover important aspects of the care pathway for people diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
This second State of the Nation report provides an overview of the pattern of care and outcomes for people diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022 in England, and 1 January 2023 and 31 to December 2023 in Wales. This includes 8 out of the 11 performance indicators for England, and 4 out of the 11 performance indicators for Wales. This year, the report includes a new contextualising measure on the proportion of people diagnosed with NHL presenting as an emergency prior to diagnosis (reported for England only). The performance indicators are outlined in the NNHLA Quality Improvement Plan 2024. The number of performance indicators reported will increase in future years, depending on the completeness and quality of the data available to the NNHLA, and methodological development work being carried out.
Findings in the report lead to five recommendations highlighting where improvements in care are needed. These recommendations are aligned to the quality improvement goals of the NNHLA.
A Data Dashboard provides results for individual organisations enabling regional and national comparisons to support local quality improvement, in addition to an Action Plan Template to support MDT discussions.
The audit uses information that is routinely collected by the NHS. For people diagnosed and treated in England, the data are collated, maintained and quality assured by NHS England’s National Disease Registration Service (NDRS). For people in Wales, data are provided by Wales Cancer Network (WCN), using the Cancer Network Information System Cymru (Canisc) electronic patient record system. A Methodology Supplement provides information on the data used in this report and the NNHLA performance indicators.
To further support quality improvement activities, NNHLA publishes quarterly reports of data quality metrics, as well as a subset of performance indicators. These quarterly reports will be further developed in the next 12 months. The NNHLA web pages also provide access to other sources of information about non-Hodgkin lymphoma.