Irish National Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Audit
National Office of Clinical Audit (NOCA).
2015 (January, data collection in first unit began).
2019 Phase1 and Phase 2 Units in 22 hospitals collecting data.
Planned roll-out to remaining 4 acute hospitals by 2023 and Private hospitals engagement to follow
National ICU Audit aims to;
- Measure indicators of the quality of care in each ICU and benchmark these against other units in Ireland and the UK through the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre ICNARC – the UK body for ICU Audit
- Measure activity in each unit to aid the planning of critical care services locally and nationally
- Provide data on complexity of care provided for each patient with potential to link this to reimbursement in the future
- National Coverage to include all ICU’s in Public and Private sector
- Improve the quality of data for HIPE by providing data on procedures and diagnoses arising while the patient is in ICU to link cost to complexity of care
- Support Irish and international research to enhance patient care.
National audit with data collection from public and private hospitals with Intensive Care Units.
National Coverage to include all ICUs in Public and Private sector.
National Intensive Care Audit is a computer-based system designed to collect demographic, clinical and outcome details on admissions to ICU’s, in hospitals nationally.
- HSE and DOH
- Hospital staff Clinical and non-Clinical
- General Public through public reporting.
Demographic details; admission details; clinical details; comorbidities; diagnostic details; clinical interventions; details of organs supported and level of care delivered, ICU and hospital outcome, details of organ donation, unit acquired infection and data to support HIPE coding.
A data dictionary and data collection manuals for all data items are available. Updating these in 2022 for new dataset changes
https://www.noca.ie/audits/irish-national-icu-audit
There is a Facility to include IHI within database from 2022 once available from HSE.
Included within the dataset are Ethnicity, Residence prior to admission, Gender, Country of birth from 2022.
All patients admitted to ICU/HDU in contributing hospital ICU’s have data collected for the full stay up to discharge from the acute hospital
Data is collected by ICU audit Coordinators (all nurses). Data is downloaded from hospital systems, taken from medical charts or records, and entering onto the ICU Audit system.
Data collection and validation is continuous, with quarterly reporting.
ICNARC coding method and definitions used for one aspect of the data set. www.icnarc.org
Records are the number of ICU Admissions which fluxes with requirement for ICU care. During 2020 (1 January 2020 to 31 December) there were 11,793 admissions to participating ICUs nationally.
Full national figure yet to be determined as all sites not rolled out.
Quarterly Quality Reports sent to hospitals and public reporting Annually from 2017
Annual reports as agreed by ICU Audit Governance Committee and NOCA Governance Board and subsequently issued by NOCA.
Data request form available at https://www.noca.ie/about-noca/access-to-audit-data
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