National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP)
Introduction from Professor Sir Norman Williams
As consultants, we should be constantly reflecting on and learning from our clinical practice. By using NCIP’s personalised data to review your NHS practice, you can help to improve patient safety and clinical quality, as well as supporting your learning and development. The NCIP data can help streamline your appraisal and provide useful evidence to support clinical impact award applications.
In addition, medical directors, responsible officers and specialty clinical leads can use NCIP to support their leadership and oversight by reviewing data for all the consultants under their designation.
Developed by clinicians, for clinicians in close collaboration with specialty associations, NCIP’s dashboards are tailored to each specialty and procedure, focussing on the data that’s most insightful for your specialty and your practice. I strongly encourage you to use the platform as I am sure you will find it useful.
Professor Sir Norman Williams,
Chair of NCIP
Emeritus Professor of Surgery
Former President of the College of Royal Surgeons
Chair of NCIP
Emeritus Professor of Surgery
Former President of the College of Royal Surgeons
Join the thousands of consultants already using the NCIP portal
NCIP is a free data platform containing consultant and provider-level activity and outcomes data for over 500 procedures in 13 surgical specialties.
It covers your NHS practice, NHS funded work in the independent sector and privately funded work carried out in the NHS. Over time, our ambition is to add independent sector data, to provide a single repository of whole practice.
Part of the Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) programme, NCIP has been developed by clinicians, for clinicians. Each specialty’s dashboards have been developed by our clinical leads, working closely with other consultants and each of the key specialty associations. NCIP is supported by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Federation of Surgical Specialty Associations as a tool that can support consultant learning and development.
NCIP is hosted on the Model Health System platform, allowing you to move between NCIP and GIRFT data, and a wide range of other metrics.
Why use NCIP?
Patient safety: review your personal practice and identify areas of variation against national and local benchmarks.
Clinical governance: review your team’s data in clinical governance and morbidity and mortality (M&M) meetings.
Quality improvement: identify areas for clinical improvement, validate the outcomes of improvement initiatives, and track the use of innovative procedures
Learning and development: download your data to provide high-quality evidence for your appraisal and revalidation and use in research or applications for clinical impact awards.
Leadership and oversight: embed at all levels of trust leadership, with enhanced access giving medical directors, responsible officers and specialty clinical leads oversight of all consultants they are responsible for.
Who can use NCIP?
- Consultants in each included specialty can see their own data benchmarked against local and national averages.
- Clinical specialty leads can see data for all consultants they are speciality lead for.
- Responsible officers can see data for all consultants in included specialties that they are responsible for.
- Medical directors and their delegates can see data for all consultants in included specialties in their trust.
Other colleagues can access the provider-level data in the Model Health System in the section marked ‘Clinical procedure cards (NCIP) on the landing page for each relevant specialty.
What specialties are included in NCIP?
NCIP currently covers 13 surgical specialties, and we hope to expand to cover more specialties, including medical and interventional, in time.
- Breast surgery
- Ear, nose and throat (ENT)
- General surgery
- Gynaecology
- Neurosurgery
- Oral and maxillofacial surgery (OMFS) and oral surgery
- Orthopaedic surgery
- Paediatric surgery
- Spinal surgery
- Surgical dermatology and skin surgery
- Thoracic surgery
- Urology
- Vascular surgery
Where does the data come from?
NCIP uses hospital episode statistics (HES) data, alongside Office for National Statistics (ONS) mortality and deprivation data. Due to low number suppression, your data will show in NCIP once you have completed six or more of any procedure included in the dashboards.
Because we use the data your trust routinely submits to the Secondary Uses Service (SUS), NCIP is automatically updated every three months, without the need for a separate data submission. There are steps you can take to improve your data quality, particularly by making sure you attribute the correct consultant to a procedure.
What do the dashboards contain?
The metrics for key procedures have been carefully chosen by our NCIP clinical leads to reflect practice in each specialty.
- Quality indicators such as length of stay, day case rates, conversion rates, readmissions, complication and revision rates and mortality.
- Bespoke metrics that are clinically relevant to that procedure.
- Anonymised patient-level data, including diagnosis and procedure codes, allowing you to track mortality and readmissions across any trust in England.
- Filters to view metrics for a specific diagnosis, procedure or surgical approach.
- Demographic data such as co-morbidity scores, deprivation levels and ethnicity to provide context.
- Generate document feature, to download your data as a PDF or .csv file.
- Unit-level data to compare your outcomes to other providers.
Why was NCIP created?
Fit for the Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England sets out a clear vision for using robust health data across the health and care system to drive transformation and continuous improvement in clinical quality. This is supported by the Dash Review of patient safety across the health and care landscape and the NHS Data Strategy: Data saves lives: reshaping health and social care with data.
NCIP is a critical part of the response to the Paterson Inquiry, which recommended there should be a single repository of the whole practice of consultants across England. The Paterson Inquiry highlighted that there is considerable variation in individual clinical practice which can remain invisible. By sharing high-quality outcome data, consultants, their appraisers and responsible officers can compare outcomes for their practice or use peer review to improve their performance in a way that is measurable and objective, leading to better safety and efficiency across the NHS.
Using NCIP for appraisal
NCIP’s data meets the General Medical Council (GMC) Guidance on Supporting Information for Revalidation, which states that:
“You should think about the activities or work in which you have been involved that has focused on improving the quality of your practice. This could include:
- Reviewing your practice against local, regional, or national benchmarking data where this is robust, attributable, and validated. It could include morbidity and mortality statistics or complication rates, and independently verified data where available for your specialty.”
“You must take part in regular reviews and audits of your work, and your team’s work, this includes taking part in any national audit or outcome review if one is being conducted in your area of practice. You must reflect on the outcomes of these audits or reviews, even if you are unable to participate directly.”
You can use our generate document feature to download your NCIP data for your appraisal.
We are exploring opportunities such as integrating NCIP into local appraisal systems. Appraisal software suppliers should email england.ncip@nhs.net to express an interest.
Join the NCIP Champions Network
We want consultants in all included specialties to benefit from NCIP’s tailored activity and outcomes data – and we need your help.
By becoming one of our NCIP Champions, you can help shape its future development and support your colleagues to use the platform.
- Log in to NCIP
First time users: can email the team at: england.ncip@nhs.net
Existing users: log in at
https://ncip.model.nhs.uk
- Contact us
- Resources
- Embedding NCIP – an implementation guide for medical directors and senior clinical leadership >
- Owning your clinical data – NCIP data quality guide >
- Case Studies
- How to Videos
- Latest News
New guide to embedding NCIP to support clinical practice
The National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) has produced a new guide for trust medical directors and senior clinical leaders to embed the use of its data into routine governance and appraisal processes.
The new guide encourages clinical leaders to establish trust-wide use of NCIP’s data and the insights it offers for improving patient outcomes and reducing unwarranted variation in clinical practice.
Neurosurgeons can access paediatric outcomes data in NCIP for the first time
Paediatric neurosurgery metrics have been added to the National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) for the first time.
Seven new dashboards for paediatric neurosurgery cover shunt creation, ventriculostomy and craniofacial procedures, and complement the 15 existing adult neurosurgery dashboards. The plan is to include more paediatric neurosurgery dashboards in future data releases, covering areas such as neuro-oncology and cranial trauma.
Latest NCIP data refresh now live
With our latest quarterly refresh, the National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) now includes data up to the end of September 2025. Surgical consultants can access your personal activity and outcomes data, which you can use as evidence your appraisal, meeting the GMC’s guidance on supporting information for revalidation. NCIP can also be used in M&M meetings, clinical audit and quality improvement.
- Recordings
NCIP Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) launch event
30th September 2025
National rollout of NCIP to consultants undertaking OMFS/OS procedures
11th September 2025
NCIP lower gastrointestinal surgery launch event
9th June 2025
NCIP upper gastrointestinal surgery launch event
6th May 2025
NCIP OMFS surgery launch event
25th March 2025
NCIP thoracic surgery launch event
2nd December 2024
Gynaecology surgeons launch event
21st November 2024
Orthopaedic surgery launch event
22nd February 2024
Paediatric surgery launch event
6th February 2024
Vascular surgery launch event
15th January 2024
NCIP: new look, new features
24th October 2023