NQAIS Clinical is a valuable resource used by over 100 users in the healthcare system to extract data for hospitals each month recording activity and predicting future trends in the healthcare system. In addition researchers find it very useful with the wealth of data available over a number of years covering a wide range of diagnoses and procedures; their publications are available on the RCSI website.

Training on the application continues to be provided using mostly a remote training model (MSTeams) to personnel in the individual hospitals, hospital groups, the Department of Health, senior management at national level and researchers. More recently training has been provided to staff in the community and hospitals involved in the re-organisation of the Health System from Hospital Groups to Regional Integrated Care Organisations (RICOs) where there will be a central mechanism to funding and delivering healthcare regionally, based on population health needs, with a stronger focus on prevention, better health outcomes and accessing care in the community.

A continuous quality improvement approach has been adopted for the NQAIS Clinical application and a number of enhancements have been made particularly in the ‘Record Select’ section to update the application in response to users’ needs and adapting the application for the provision of healthcare data on groups such as Ukrainians.

Going forward the application’s coding tables will be adapted in response to the updating of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) from Edition 10 to Edition 12 of the Hospital Inpatient Enquiry (HIPE) data.