The National Lung Cancer Audit (NLCA) evaluates how the care received by patients diagnosed with lung cancer in England and Wales compares with current recommended practice and provides information that supports healthcare providers, commissioners, and regulators to improve the care for patients. The NLCA reports a set of process and outcome measures that cover important aspects of the care pathway for patients with lung cancer.
In the first NLCA State of the Nation report, we give an overview of the patterns of care and outcomes for 34,478 patients diagnosed with lung cancer in England in 2021. A separate section provides detailed results on the care received by 2,244 patients diagnosed in Wales in 2020 and 2021.
The report describes the results of an analysis using data provided by the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) and the Welsh Cancer Network. It summarises the performance of lung cancer services in 2021, and compares this to the situation in 2019 and 2020.
Individual provider results are available. These enable regional and national comparisons to support local QI. In addition, there is a patient and public version of the report available.
National Lung Cancer Audit State of the Nation Report 2023 – Version 3
This was the first State of the Nation Report produced by the National Lung Cancer Team. We have received feedback and queries from provider trusts which we have used to make improvements to the report and our overall approach to the project.
Based on the feedback received, we have changed the figure displaying risk-adjusted survival estimates for Welsh Health boards to instead show Welsh hospitals. It was felt this was more useful to Welsh provider trusts.
We have also updated the values for the proportion of Patients in England with stage IV disease in previous years (2019 and 2020) because these proportions were based on all patients and included patients with unknown values. Now patients with unknown values have been removed from the overall number of the proportion.
In this report, the results for English patients were derived using data from the Rapid Cancer Registration Dataset (RCRD). The NLCA have traditionally allocated patients to NHS organisations based on their “site first seen” however the algorithm used previously to determine “site first seen” could not be used with the data supplied for this report. We encourage NHS trusts to ensure the COSD field “place first seen” is completed to enable this approach in future.
We thank the individual provider trusts who have highlighted issues and suggestions for improvements. We have listened to the suggestions and made changes when possible. These suggestions will also help to shape the audit in the future.
Addendum November 2023: The infographic on page 5 has been updated to correct an error.
NLCA State of the Nation 2023 Change Log