The purpose of the National Ovarian Cancer Audit (NOCA) is to evaluate the patterns of care and outcomes for patients with ovarian cancer in England and Wales, and to support services to improve the quality of care for these patients.
NOCA is part of the National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre (NATCAN), the home of the ten national cancer audits in England and Wales. This national centre of excellence was established to strengthen cancer services by evaluating the process of diagnosis and treatment, and patient outcomes in multiple cancer sites.
This version includes the second quarterly clinical performance indicator report produced by the NOCA, which has been released alongside an updated version of their data quality dashboard. Previous versions of the performance indicator and data quality dashboards were released in the format of an Excel file. This version also includes an additional performance indicator on two-year survival.
The quarterly report provides an overview of the performance indicators as well as quality of key data items from Rapid Cancer Registration Data (RCRD). The main cohort comprises a definition of ovarian cancer using RCRD supplied by the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) for ICD10 codes C56 ovarian cancer, C57 fallopian tube cancer, C48 primary peritoneal cancer after excluding sarcomas, and D39.1 cancer of the ovary of uncertain or unknown behaviour.
What routine national data has been used to produce this Quarterly Report?
In England, NATCAN receives information from the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS), part of the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS), NHS England. NDRS 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 NDRS monthly via Multidisciplinary Team electronic data collection systems. Clinical sign-off of data submitted to NDRS is not mandated in England. The information held in the registration dataset is compiled from a number of sources.
For this quarterly report, the NOCA utilised data from the Rapid Cancer Registration Dataset (RCRD). This dataset is compiled from a variety of sources including the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD), Hospital Episode Statistics admitted patient care (HES APC) records, the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy dataset (SACT) and data submitted by pathology laboratories 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 women diagnosed with ovarian cancer in England during the reporting period.
Further information about the RCRD can be found here.
This NOCA report allocates patients to NHS organisations based on the “trust at diagnosis” recorded within the RCRD dataset.
Please note: the total number of patients from which the Cancer Alliance and NHS trust figures were derived is less than the total number of patients used for the national figures. This is because not all patients had a trust of diagnosis in the RCRD data.
For any queries relating to the audit, please email: [email protected]
Last updated: 9 January 2025, 9:55am