The National Pancreatic Cancer Audit (NPaCA) determines whether the care received by people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer 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 NPaCA reports a set of process and outcome measures that cover important aspects of the care pathway for people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
This first State of the Nation report provides an overview of the pattern of care and outcomes for people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer between January 2020 to December 2021 in England, and January 2022 to December 2022 in Wales. This includes 10 of the performance indicators for England, and 7 out of the 10 performance indicators for Wales outlined in the NPaCA Quality Improvement Plan 2024. Fewer indicators are reported for Wales due to differences in data availability, notably data items about MDT discussion, involvement of a CNS and prescribing of PERT, were not available for this report.
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 NPaCA.
A Data Viewer 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 NPaCA performance indicators.
To further support quality improvement activities, NPaCA also publishes quarterly reports of data quality metrics and, from October 2024 (England only), will publish a subset of performance indicators. These quarterly reports are work in progress and will be further developed in the next 12 months. The NPaCA web pages also provide access to other sources of information about pancreatic cancer.