The National Kidney Cancer Audit (NKCA) aims to evaluate the patterns of care and outcomes for people with kidney cancer in England and Wales, using routinely collected data and to support services to improve their care quality.
This third State of the Nation report aims to help NHS organisations to benchmark their kidney cancer care against measurable standards, to identify unwarranted variation in measures of processes and outcomes, and to describe national levels and patterns of these measures in England and Wales.
This report includes people diagnosed with kidney cancer between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2023 in England and between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2024 in Wales. It reports on eight performance indicators for England and five for Wales, as outlined in the NKCA Quality Improvement Plan, updated in February 2026. The report also describes the national time trends among NHS trusts in England between 1 January 2019 and 30 September 2025.
Findings in the report lead to five recommendations to drive improvements in the quality of kidney cancer care.
Provider-level results can be found on the NKCA Data Dashboard.
This year’s report introduced several new elements:
- Alignment with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance for kidney cancer
- Launch of the NKCA Quality Improvement Intervention
- Expanded reporting for Wales
- Expansion of PI 8 definition
- Improvements to case-mix adjustment
- Ongoing methodological work