National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre

The contract is expected to initially be delivered for NHS-funded care in England and Wales, for a period of 3 years, at a maximum total budget of up to £11,145,600 including VAT and £9,288,000 GBP excluding VAT. Bids exceeding this limit will be rejected. There is potential to extend the contract for up to two additional years as well as the option to include other Devolved Nations and/or Crown Dependencies, and aspirational measures (which will be defined in the service specification).

The maximum budget 'core' value is £11,145,600 including VAT and £9,288,000 GBP excluding VAT. This excludes the potential two year extension and aspirational intent

which will be included in the service specification at point of tender, meaning the ceiling value has the potential to be higher.

Due to the unknowns in advance of holding the premarket engagement session, it is currently expected that the extension value will be a 2 year pro rata of the core 3 year funding, estimated at £6,192,000 excluding VAT.

This proposed extension value may also include pro rata funding of any additional aspirational measures invoked in the first 3 years of the contract. For example: If an aspirational annual requirement costing £500,000 per year is invoked in year 3, then the extension funding (if the aspirational measure is continued) will be the above figures plus the additional £500,000 per year.

Further to this funding, the final specification will contain a list of aspirational measures which will be expected to be modified into the contract should the need and funding

become available. The aspirational intent value, excluding the potential 2 year extension, is unknown at point of drafting this notice, so, an estimated value of £10,000,000 excluding VAT is applied to form the maximum ceiling value AT POINT OF DRAFTING THIS NOTICE. This aspirational intent has the potential to be invoked fully, partially, or not at all, and the Authority cannot guarantee that the successful supplier will be required to do any of the aspirational measures that will be listed in the final specification.

The role of national clinical audits is to stimulate healthcare improvement through the provision of high quality information on the organisation, delivery and outcomes of

healthcare, together with tools and support to enable healthcare providers and other audiences to make best use of this information. Outcomes are benchmarked against

national guidance and standards e.g. quality standards from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and those from other established professional and

patient sources. Successful national audits are those where the individuals providing the data are also in a position to improve the system, and there is a shared understanding of

what good care looks like.

The National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre, was established in 2022 with the aim of creating a recognised centre of expertise and advice in cancer audit delivery. The ten national cancer audits hosted by the Centre are part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP). These ten audits are as follows: •Bowel cancer

•Primary breast cancer

•Metastatic breast cancer

•Kidney cancer

•Lung cancer

•Non-Hodgkin lymphoma

•Oesophago-gastric cancer

•Ovarian cancer

•Pancreatic cancer

•Prostate cancer

The overarching aim is to stimulate improvements in care for patients by measuring variations in healthcare quality, experience and outcomes . During this contract period, the successful supplier will need to build on the achievements of the Centre to date. Data is most useful locally for healthcare improvement when its provision to clinical teams is timely, the data is refreshed regularly and appropriate tools, support and guidance accompany the data outputs. The intent is for all of these features to be implemented and developed further during the period of this contract.

The successful supplier will work with commissioners, funders, stakeholders and local structures to create a coherent strategy for how the improvement goals will be achieved.

By way of example, the current contract specification includes the following anticipated benefits of a National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre:

•Greater consistency and standardisation of cancer audit delivery

•Flexibility to share specialised resources between audit topics (such as statisticians and data analysts, and patient and public involvement expertise)

•Enhanced subcontracting power across topics (such as for data visualisation platforms)

•Enhanced adoption and spread of:

-Learning from pilot work

-Skills and expertise (such as the potential future use of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) as a data source)

•Consistency/alignment of communications strategies where audit topic audiences overlap

This audit programme is expected to:

•Develop and action topic-specific improvement plans (with SMART improvement goals) to stimulate healthcare improvements in the commissioned cancer audit areas

•Identify from the outset the full range of audiences for the audit outputs, and QI support tools, and plan and tailor them accordingly

•Involve patients, the public and the full range of relevant professional stakeholders in developing the improvement plans, and at all subsequent stages of design and delivery

•Report variations in quality and outcomes of NHS-funded care to enable achievement of the improvement goals

•Include comparisons against national guidelines and standards as well as between healthcare providers and systems

•Include comparisons designed to stimulate reductions of inequalities of care by age, sex, ethnicity, deprivation and other key determinants

•Identify and develop best practice in the use of pre-existing cancer data sources including linked and/or linkable data

•Prioritise timely reporting of data, minimising the lag between measured clinical events and reporting

•Identify and report outlier healthcare providers

•Support the use of audit results to inform the development or update of key standards, guidelines and other national initiatives

•Accelerate the adoption of new learning between audits, enhance risk mitigation and deliver economies of scale within the Centre

•Generate and spread new learning and expertise in the use of cancer data for improvement

Further details of the existing audit can be found at: https://www.natcan.org.uk/