About
Established in 2006, the National Neonatal Audit Programme (NNAP) is commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP). The NNAP is funded by NHS England, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland. We are currently contracted to deliver the NNAP to the end of March 2027.
The NNAP assesses whether babies admitted to neonatal units in England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man receive consistent high quality care. We identify areas for quality improvement in relation to the delivery and outcomes of care.
From March 2026, the NNAP have started to collect data from Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland are expected to be included published NNAP data from 2026 (expected to be published October 2027).
Scope of the audit
NNAP uses a range of measures to monitor neonatal care and highlight where improvement is required. These measures can vary from year to year and are categorised into the following themes:
- Outcomes of neonatal care
- Optimal perinatal care
- Maternal breastmilk feeding
- Parental partnership in care
- Neonatal nurse staffing
- Care processes
- Overall network performance
Aims of the audit
The NNAP has set out a series of supporting objectives, and approaches to stimulating healthcare improvement, which include:
- High quality data outputs that identify areas for action and support stakeholders’ improvement initiatives.
- Sharing best practice and quality improvement resources
- Collaboration and engagement with regional and national initiatives
- Parent and public engagement
The NNAP has section 251 approval to collect patient identifiable data without explicit patient consent. This data is processed and reported by the NNAP team at Â鶹´«Ã½, with HQIP (Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership) and NHS England as the joint data controllers.
HQIP may approve the sharing of pseudonymised NNAP data for the purpose of academic research if stringent data protection policies and arrangements can be demonstrated by requestees and the aims of the research are approved.
See NNAP privacy notices, including how audit data is used
Management structure and project team
Download a diagram of the NNAP management structure (PDF)
NNAP project team:
- NNAP Manager, Rachel Winch
- NNAP Project Coordinator, Georgia Lewis
- NNAP Clinical Lead, Dr Sam Oddie
- Audits Senior Data Analyst, Humfrey Legge
- Audits Administrator, Tom Keiller
- Head of Audits, Calvin Down
You can contact us on nnap@rcpch.ac.uk.
UPCARE tool
The Understanding Practice in Clinical Audit and Registries (UPCARE) tool is a protocol to describe the key features of clinical audits and registries designed by HQIP. It provides a "one-stop" summary of the key information about how clinical audits and registries have been designed and carried out. It aims to help people understand the methods, evaluate the quality and robustness of the data, and find information and data that is most relevant to them.
Download UPCARE tool at programme and workstream levels below
National Clinical Audit Benchmarking (NCAB) project
NCAB provides a visual snapshot of individual Trust audit data set against individual national benchmarks. It is a collaboration between HQIP and CQC, which aims to enhance the way inspectors, medical directors, local clinical audit teams and others engage, interact with and share clinical audit data.
NNAP submit results for English and Welsh units to this project annually.