Introduction

The Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme (SSNAP) is a major national healthcare quality improvement programme based in the School of Life Course and Population Sciences at King’s College London.  SSNAP measures the quality and organisation of stroke care in the NHS and is the single source of stroke data in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

SSNAP measures both the processes of care (clinical audit) provided to stroke patients, as well as the structure of stroke services (organisational audit) against evidence based standards, including the 2016 National Clinical Guideline for Stroke. The overall aim of SSNAP is to provide timely information to clinicians, commissioners, patients, and the public on how well stroke care is being delivered so it can be used as a tool to improve the quality of care that is provided to patients. SSNAP has been voted the most effective national clinical audit in the UK for nine consecutive years by healthcare professionals involved in audit.

For more detailed information about SSNAP protocol and practices, please access the UPCARE-tool, a “one stop” summary of the key information about the design and delivery of SSNAP.

These are the different sections included in the text that follows. Select the relevant text below or use the left hand menu to quickly navigate to a specific section.

• SSNAP Clinical Audit
  • Overview
  • Data collection
    • Developing a core dataset
    • Standardising data interpretation
    • Eligibility criteria
    • Data collection timelines
    • Data collection deadlines
  • Data analysis methodology
    • Analysing ‘locked data’ only
    • Patient centred and team centred analysis
    • Team type categorisation
    • Tiers of reporting
    • Statistical terminologies
  • SSNAP Reporting
    • Case ascertainment and participation
    • Audit compliance
    • Key indicators, domains and scoring
    • Frequency of reporting
    • Phased dissemination of reports
    • Reporting outputs
    • Mortality reporting
    • Calculating key indicators
    • Accessing SSNAP reports
• SSNAP Acute Organisational Audit
• SSNAP Post-Acute Organisational Audit
• Further uses of SSNAP data
  • Quality Improvement and SSNAP
  • Research and SSNAP
  • Health Economics and SSNAP
• Patient Working
• Dependencies and Evidence Based Standards
• SSNAP Governance