HospitalCheck

Stroke care (SSNAP audit)

Published by Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme (Royal College of Physicians, King's College London) · Official source

Update schedule

  • Quarterly, published roughly 3 months after each quarter ends.

Level of detail

  • Stroke TEAM — a trust can run more than one (e.g. two hyperacute units)

What we show

  • The overall SSNAP level (A best .. E), the audit's own comparative grade for the team's acute stroke-care processes, and the underlying 0-100 SSNAP score
  • The 7 SSNAP care domains — hyperacute assessment, specialist pathway, reperfusion, MDT assessment, therapy intensity, therapy frequency, and standards by discharge — each graded A-E from the patient-centred view (care as patients experienced it)
  • Case ascertainment band and audit compliance band (both A-E) — DATA-QUALITY context, not care-quality measures

Caveats

  • The SSNAP level is ADJUSTED for case-mix, case ascertainment and audit compliance, and is published by the audit itself as a comparative grade — unlike a raw outcome number (for example a mortality rate), this is the audit body's own graded verdict, which is why, unlike SHMI, we show and rank it (see /stroke).
  • It measures the quality of a team's acute stroke-care PROCESSES over the quarter — for example, how quickly patients are assessed, scanned and started on the right treatment pathway — NOT a guarantee of any individual patient's outcome.
  • Case ascertainment and audit compliance bands are DATA-QUALITY context: a team with a lower band there has a grade resting on less-complete data, not necessarily worse care. We always show both bands alongside the grade and flag it explicitly when either is D or E.
  • A trust can run more than one stroke team (for example a hyperacute unit and a separate rehabilitation or stroke unit); each is graded and shown separately, so a trust page can list more than one grade.
  • We match SSNAP's own free-text trust name against the ODS trust register by name; a small number of names (mainly non-NHS community providers, and a handful of renamed trusts we haven't yet mapped) don't resolve to a trust and so don't appear on any hospital or trust page, even though the audit publishes a grade for them.
  • England only for the purpose of this site's trust and hospital pages and the /stroke ranking — SSNAP also grades stroke teams in Wales and Northern Ireland, which are not shown here because they don't resolve to an England trust.
  • We parse the workbook's 'Scoring Summary' sheet: the overall SSNAP level and score are the audit's own headline team grade. The 7 domain grades are taken specifically from SSNAP's PATIENT-CENTRED domain breakdown (care as patients experienced it, including those transferred — the more complete of the audit's two published variants, the other being team-centred), a related but distinct view, not the headline level split apart.

Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.