09 March 2026
NEIAA is a crucial tool for rheumatology services across the country to benchmark key areas for improvement or share insight into what is going well. Despite participation being mandatory, we currently see a great deal of variation in engagement, which can impact how effective the overall dataset is – making it even more important that we all contribute as much data as possible
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The Great Western Hospital, serving the growing and diverse population of Swindon (catchment area of 350,000 and annual HES activity of 9870), is a fantastic example of what high levels of engagement can reveal. In the 2024/2025 audit year, this service entered more than 200 patients (a disproportionately high amount), demonstrating that there could be more eligible patients within our care than have been presumed so far.
The audit found key strengths within the department (even with access challenges), high rates of treatment initiation was recorded within 6 weeks of referral – above the national average. The data also revealed that while the pathway design and admin processes could use some optimisation, clinical decision making was exemplary.
The data that Great Western collected also exposed system level factors such as centralised booking processes and late appointment notifications contributing to delays in the time it took for patients to receive their first appointment. It even helped to identify some outlier cases in wait time statistics, which were adversely affecting the averages. Bringing these issues to light gave them a valuable opportunity to investigate effective solutions.
While engaging with the audit might reveal weaker metrics than we might like to see, this information is vital for sharing solutions and improving as a specialty. Incomplete engagement can mask problems, limit the opportunity to do better, and weaken national learning for the country.
The importance of having the ability to benchmark metrics against other services and take learnings from the differences cannot be overstated enough. The audit has shown, on a national scale, that performance is strongly linked to how a service is organised, not just individual effort – arguing that the biggest impact can come from working smarter as a team, not necessarily harder.
NEIAA continues to evolve to meet the needs of our rheumatological community, additional contextual data is on its way to help create an even more comprehensive picture of national data at scale, but we cannot achieve our mission without you. You have the power to ensure NEIAA continues to be a credible, practical tool for service improvement. Honest data benefits individual services, the wider profession, and ultimately patients with early inflammatory arthritis.
The current data collection cycle ends soon, please ensure you enter all eligible patients by April 14th.