The National Audit of Breast Cancer in Older Patients (NABCOP) is a clinical audit to evaluate the quality of care provided to women aged 70 years and older by breast cancer services in England and Wales. The NABCOP is a five year project that started in April 2016.

Clinical audit is a tool used by health care professionals to monitor and improve patient care by comparing how patients are treated and their outcomes against explicit standards or guidelines.

In a clinical audit, information on the care received by patients is collected and analysed to see if individual clinicians and hospitals are following national clinical standards, such as those published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). These audits usually also produce information for hospitals to compare their outcomes of care with other hospitals.

This national clinical audit is run by the Association of Breast Surgery (ABS) and the Clinical Effectiveness Unit (CEU) of The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS). We are funded by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP).

Day to day running of the NABCOP is managed by a project team at the CEU.

We want to support the improvement of hospital care for older patients with breast cancer. Research shows that there are differences in the care given to younger and older patients with breast cancer. The NABCOP aims to find out what these differences are and to understand why these differences are happening.

We will share our findings with hospitals in England and Wales. In particular, we will tell hospitals about the areas of breast cancer care that they are doing well in and where they could improve.

All NHS hospitals in England and Wales that provide breast cancer care will participate in the NABCOP.

The NABCOP does not ‘collect’ patient data directly. Instead, we use information about patients that have already been collected by national organisations in England and Wales. These include the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) in England and the Cancer Network Information System Cymru (CANISC) in Wales. To find out more about information collected by cancer registration services, please visit the NCRAS website.

Findings from the NABCOP will be published on this website.

The national data opt-out allows patients to opt-out of their information being used for purposes other than their immediate clinical care (such as for audit and research purposes). All NHS organisations are required to be compliant with the national data opt-out policy by 30th September 2020.

For national clinical audits such as the NABCOP, using existing sources of patient data collected by the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) in England, individual’s opt-out preferences are applied by NCRAS prior to the NABCOP receiving the datasets.

For more information on the national data opt-out, please visit the NHS website: https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/

We will be using data collected on patients who are diagnosed with breast cancer between 1st January 2014 and 31st December 2017 and receive care in NHS hospitals in England and Wales.

The aim of the audit is to improve the care received by patients with breast cancer. We will do this by making recommendations to breast cancer services based on our findings. For example, the NABCOP may make recommendations on:

• How women were diagnosed
• The type of surgery that older women have for breast cancer
• The use of radiotherapy after surgery
• The use of chemotherapy

We work closely with patient representatives and patient charities on many aspects throughout the project, from deciding what information to collect to how the results are reported.

For patient information about the NABCOP, please read our patient information leaflet.
For all queries related to the NABCOP, please contact us.