Patient Experience

Patient Experience

Introduction

The Cancer Audit Programme (CAP) at St James’s Hospital was established in 2001. Its goal from the outset was to provide comprehensive prospective data on the structures, processes and outcomes of cancer care delivered by the many national, supra-regional and regional cancer services at the hospital.

Since its inception at St James’s Hospital, the CAP has supported continuous quality improvement and has developed in tandem with structural changes including defined multidisciplinary teams, cancer clinics, rapid-access processes and care pathways, and integrated practice units.

The audit programme enables detailed information to be provided to the administration and board of the hospital, Trinity St James’s Cancer Institute (TSJCI), and relevant bodies including the National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP), the Department of Health (DOH), the Health Service Executive (HSE), and the Health Information Quality Authority (HIQA). It facilitates quality improvement through reporting and monitoring of in-house and national key performance indicators (KPIs). It also provides a framework for measuring the cost of cancer care.

The provision of high-quality cancer data remains an operational and strategic priority at the hospital and TSJCI. Cancer audit is a core foundation of the Institute, supporting research education and quality improvement, and enabling other key platforms including bio-resourcing, basic and translational scientific research, and clinical care.

Phone (01) 410 3746
Email lmcdowell@stjames.ie
Lisa McDowell, Cancer Audit Programme Manager

  • The CAP is managed by a cancer audit programme manager and clinically led by the cancer audit clinical director. The CAP has dedicated cancer data managers for most cancer sites including lung, oesophageal/gastric, breast, colorectal, skin, gynaecological, head and neck, and urology.

    Team

    • Thérèse Brown, Gynae cancer data manager
    • Colin Farrington, Skin cancer data manager
    • Karina Delaney, Breast cancer data manager
    • Mary Devlin, Head and neck cancer data manager
    • Chris Gleeson, Colorectal cancer data manager
    • Sinéad King, Upper GI cancer data manager
    • Fiona Mulvany, Lung cancer data manager
    • Lynn Geraghty, Urology cancer data manager

  • The CAP supports and highlights cancer activity at the hospital through publication of comprehensive audit reports, contributions to annual reports, national benchmarking and KPI reporting, quality improvement initiatives, and research.

    The first audit report was published in 2004, followed by a six year report of incidence and outcome cancer data in 2008, the first of its kind in Ireland, followed by a comprehensive 10 year report (2003-2012) published in 2013.

    In Q4 2018, the CAP compiled a third Cancer Audit Report. The primary objective of this report is to present a comprehensive audit of cancer care undertaken at St James’s Hospital from 2013 to 2017. The focus of this report is on outcomes of care and includes patterns in patient volumes and incidence trends, referral patterns, and complexity of care.

    The team provides comprehensive Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reports to the National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP) for breast, lung, prostate, skin, oesophagogastric and rectal cancers.  The NCCP KPI programme allows St James’s Hospital to evaluate the quality of our cancer services, compare our performance against other cancer centres and ensure a culture of continuous quality improvement in the delivery of cancer care.