NJR Quality Data Provider Awards 2026
For our 2025 awards programme, we have seen the achievement of an incredible:
296 Gold; 39 Silver and 19 Bronze awards
Thank you to all hospital staff team for their commitment and engagement with the 2024/25 audit.
Our audit awards are based on a three-tier system: Gold, Silver and Bronze levels, to encourage all hospitals to strive to achieve the most excellent data quality standards. This enables only those who achieve the highest standards to receive the Gold level, giving them the greatest recognition for achieving excellence in supporting patient safety standards through their compliance with the mandatory NJR data submission quality audit process.
We thank all the hospital teams who have demonstrated their commitment to engage in the NJR audit and offer our congratulations to all those who have achieved an award!
We are delighted to share the full list of those hospitals awarded in 2025 – here.
To achieve an award for the 2026 audit, hospitals are again required to meet the targets in the criteria set out in the ‘Criteria Table’ ( see download link on the left-hand side of this page).
For the 2025/26 QDP Award, the criteria have been updated to encourage hospitals to upload their audit in a timely manner, allowing time for any work to be completed by the 30 September audit deadline.
To qualify for the award, hospitals need to upload a clean set of audit data by 31 August 2026.
| Audit Period | Audit data submission deadline for award eligibility | Quality Data Provider award year |
|---|---|---|
| 2025/26 | 30 September 2026 | 2026 |
OPCS codes for hip hemiarthroplasty and DAIRs procedures have been determined, to be included as part of the audited data. You can find a link to these codes here: OPCS Codes
Those hospitals who achieve an award will have the equivalent award emblem placed on their hospital dashboard page: https://surgeonprofile.njrcentre.org.uk – the NJR’s Surgeon and Hospital Profile website which displays orthopaedic data for all hospitals where joint replacement operations are carried out, in all of the geographical areas where the NJR is operational. The website data are refreshed annually, during the month of January each year.
We will also again be publishing the outcome of the awards this year on this website. Teams can also request the emblem logo to place on their own hospital website.
Our regional NJR staff can offer support to help hospitals attain the audit targets we have set for the achievement of the award. If you would like assistance in relation to any of your audits, please contact your NJR Compliance Officer via the NJR Service Desk to request their support, by email at enquiries@njrcentre.org.uk. You can also contact Maggie Tate, NJR Data Quality Officer, via the NJR Service Desk.
FAQs
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Does the audit for 2025/26 include hip hemiarthroplasty and DAIRs procedures? | For the 2025/26 audit, hip hemiarthroplasty and DAIRs procedures are included. Hospitals who do not include these procedures in their audit file will not receive an award. |
| How is baseline compliance calculated? | Baseline compliance is calculated by looking at the number of relevant cases from your hospital PAS upload (excluding those that you have marked as not being NJR procedures or where the patient hasn’t consented) and seeing how many of these have a corresponding NJR record on the first run of the DQA – i.e. before any missing cases are added to the registry. |
| Does the three-tier system mean a site needs to have an initial score of at least 95% to meet the criteria? As an example, some of our sites start below this threshold but then work on the data to meet the 95%. Will this mean these sites will no longer get the award if that’s the case? | That’s right. We want to award the units that have good systems and processes in place to identify patients at the time of their operation. Where patients are identified later using the DQA, this means it takes longer for us to identify issues and also means that patients are less likely to be asked for their consent. |
| How does the three-tier system work with sites who upload data in sections throughout the year before submitting the whole audit towards the end of the year? Will this ‘part submissions’ process impact their ability to meet the | Where a hospital submits PAS data more than once in a year (e.g., quarterly) then the baseline compliance is aggregated across each submission to give a single baseline percentage. The status of each case as present or missing is based on its first appearance in the file. |
| What is the criteria for achieving each of gold, silver and bronze awards? Will it be 100% on initial upload of activity data before any audit correct is gold, silver if after audit 100% is reached and bronze 95 – 99% achievement after audit? | Our bronze award is minimum 95% baseline and 98% when missing cases are entered The silver award is minimum 97% baseline and 99% when missing cases are entered The gold award is 99% baseline and 100% when missing cases are entered. |
| Other than the data quality audit scores, what other criteria must be met to achieve each of Gold, Silver and Bronze awards? | Hospitals need to have achieved: ● Baseline compliance of 95% / 98% / 99% ● Percentage of cases with no status to be no higher than 2% / 1% / 0% ● End state compliance of 98% / 99% / 100% |
| Are there any other associated criteria necessary for award qualification? | Yes, it is also important that commitment to timely and appropriate engagement with the NJR review processes with regard to any hospital or surgeon alerts issued has taken place during the current financial year. |
| Will we get a chance to remove any records which shouldn’t be in the audit (e.g. NJR consent refused) & reprocess the audit before our initial compliance is calculated? | Yes, cases where NJR consent are refused or confirmed to not be NJR procedures will be removed from the denominator for both baseline and end state compliance calculations. |
| How long do we have from the initial upload to look at the audit, remove any records which need to be excluded and reprocess it? | Any cases identified as exclusions within four weeks of the initial upload will be excluded from the denominator for both baseline and end-state compliance. |
Snapshot of award criteria
