TY - JOUR T1 - The National Lung Cancer Audit – Year 5 completeness and outcomes and case-mix adjustment JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J VL - 38 IS - Suppl 55 SP - p4418 AU - Paul Beckett AU - Roz Stanley AU - Ian Woolhouse AU - Laila Tata AU - Michael Peake Y1 - 2011/09/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/38/Suppl_55/p4418.abstract N2 - Introduction: The National Lung Cancer Audit aims to record outcomes in lung cancer on a large scale and through case-mix adjustment, start to explain the wide variations in outcomes between hospitals in the UK and between the UK and other westernised countries. This abstract presents results for patients first seen in 2009 in England and Wales.Results: For patients first seen in 2009, 37,304 cases were submitted from England (30,096), Wales (1,973), Scotland (4,379), Northern Ireland (819) and Jersey (37), representing >97% of the expected number of cases. Results suggest that the quality of care is improving.View this table:Headline resultsHowever, these mean results hide significant variation across the cancer networks, which persists even after adjustment for case-mix (age, sex, stage, performance status, socio-economic status). The example of surgery for NSCLC is shown in the figure.Conclusions: The results suggest that care for lung cancer patients in the UK is slowly improving, although some of the apparent improvement is likely to reflect the rise in data quality. However, wide variations in outcomes persist between organisations which is not explained by simple case-mix variation. These variations need to be the focus of on-going service improvement work. ER -