Welcome to the NHPHA website

Following the success of an audit within Greater Manchester hospitals investigating the delivery of health promotion to patients, the Department of Health provided funding to further develop the audit into a web-based audit which all NHS hospitals within England can utilise.

The project also has the support from the Royal College of Nursing. Their statement of support can be found on the publications page.

About our Project

Health promotion and health education are currently a top priority for hospitals in England; however, there are many challenges to delivering health promotion to patients within secondary care and/or sign-posting patients to receiving health promotion externally. Difficulties in implementing health promotion to patients within hospitals can be due to internal problems such as lack of suitable training facilities, absence of health promotion as a priority, and difficulty in implementing organisational changes to achieve a health promoting setting, or external problems such as the lack of funding and national guidance for a health promotion strategy for hospitals and links with partner organisations.

The NHPHA is intended to address some of these challenges by providing hospitals with information on the extent to which their adult hospitalised patient population is delivered health promotion for healthy lifestyles, to benchmark the provision of health promotion nationally, and to use comparative data to drive for sustained improvements in the delivery of health promotion to hospital patients.

To participate in the audit, hospitals are expected to provide data from 100 randomly selected adult hospitalised patients. Medical case notes will be used to provide information on whether patients were assessed for the following risk factors: smoking, alcohol misuse, obesity, and physical inactivity; and where there was evidence of a risk factor, that some form of health promotion was delivered. Health promotion may include verbal advice, written advice, referral to a specialist, referral to a GP/practice nurse and drug treatments for smoking and alcohol misuse.

Participation in the audit will result in hospitals being provided with an automated report on the proportion ± 95% confidence intervals of those assessed for a risk factor, having a risk factor, and delivered health promotion. A more detailed final report which enables benchmarking across organisations and an understanding of whether differences in performance are due to differences in length of stay, age and gender of patients will be provided.

The audit was piloted from October 2008 to January 2009; and the first round of the audit started in June 2009. The final report for the 2009 audit is now available to download from the guidance page.

The NHPHA will run as a bi-annual audit in order to allow hospitals to make change to health promotion practice before re-audit. Prior to participating in the audit all participants will be required to complete an organisational survey in March 2011. The survey will support the interpretation of the audit data and enable appropriate guidance on how health promotion services can be improved. The next audit round will be open from July 2011, utilising data from patients discharged in March 2011. Data collectors will be able to log on to the website to input data for the second round of this bi-annual audit from 1st July 2011. The deadline for data input will be 31st October 2011.

Standards

In the fullness of time we expect hospitals to assess all of their adult inpatients for smoking, alcohol and obesity, and assess 50% for physical activity. Health promotion is expected to be delivered to the majority of smokers, harmful drinkers, and obese patients and efforts made to address physical activity in half of inactive patients. As a starting point, the standards for 2009 have been developed in reference to findings from a Greater Manchester Health Promotion in Hospitals audit and the pilot results for the NHPHA. Standards represent what we have found is realistically achievable for hospitals to currently deliver. Standards for 2011 are under review.

To participate in the NHPH Audit

1. The lead for the NHPHA at your hospital should send an email to Steve Knuckey at support@nhphaudit.org from an NHS email address, requesting access to the database.
   The minimum information required to register should include the following:
   • Name(s) of data collector(s)
   • Job title(s)
   • Full address of hospital (including postcode)
   • Email address(es)
   • Contact telephone number(s)

Please note: that there must be at least two data collectors, one of whom will be undertaking the double data collection of 10 randomly selected case notes (this can not be the same person that originally collected the data).

2. Once you are registered a username will be emailed directly to you with a request to contact the NHPHA helpdesk and a personal password will then be issued.
3. Go to www.nhphaudit.org (this website) - and click on the Login button on the menu on the left or on the one at the top right hand corner of the web page (under the title banner) - you will then be asked to enter your username and password.
4. You will then be directed to a page where you can change your password.

If you have any queries or would like assistance when entering data for the first time, contact details are provided on the Contacts page.