‘The NCEPOD Method’ – How the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death designs and delivers national clinical outcome review programmes:

IntroductionThis publication describes the method used by the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) to run confidential enquiries. With its history based around the review of surgical mortality, NCEPOD has now grown into a medical as well as surgical review and expanded its remit to review overall quality of care of all patients.Methods and analysisThe work will describe the qualitative method used by NCEPOD to conduct a national confidential enquiry, starting with how a topic is selected through to report production. Covering all hospitals in the UK and using a network of local contacts, NCEPOD reviews a sample of cases from each hospital and provides in-depth multidisciplinary peer review to give a national picture on the quality of care provided. The peer review data collected is underpinned by quantitative data collected using questionnaires, and all analyses are undertaken using pivot tables in Excel. The paper will highlight the strengths, limitations and challenges o...