Dear stroke clinical leads and SSNAP participants,
 
This letter is to inform you that SSNAP will be based at King’s College London University in the Department of Population Health Sciences from Spring 2018. Although the SSNAP contract for the next 3 years has been awarded to a different organisation, strong links will still be maintained with the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). Many of the staff, as well as the webtool and data entry processes remain the same despite this move. The RCP will still be important to the continued success of the programme, ensuring a good relationship with stroke physicians and working closely on the future of the National Clinical Guideline for stroke and peer review scheme.
 
The move to King’s will offer significant benefits, such as increased patient involvement and academic support. We will also be working on ensuring that the data you collect is used for local, regional and national quality improvement (QI) projects and initiatives to ensure that the audit is visible, utilised and a facilitator for QI in stroke care. The data collected by all of you are of great importance, and have been used for vital research which has contributed to the improvement of stroke care both regionally and nationally (many examples can be seen in the SSNAP Research area), for this reason we include the ‘SSNAP Collaboration’ as a contributing author on all SSNAP related research publications. This move to King’s will provide further academic and statistical support to expand the quantity and quality of research using SSNAP data on both a national and international level.
 
Whilst I wish to stress that we are not planning any immediate changes to the audit which will impact users due to this move, there are data governance procedures which may cause some delays around the time of the move. Despite this, we aim to ensure that the standards of the helpdesk are maintained, responding to most queries within 2 working days, and more complicated queries within 1 week.
 
The contract also includes an Acute Organisational Audit, for which the timelines have not been fully agreed upon. The follow-up to the 2016 Organisational Audit may occur later this year, or in 2019, but we do not yet have the required agreements in order to make this announcement. However, you can be sure that an Acute Organisational Audit will take place prior to the end of 2019, and you will have plenty of advanced notice of both timelines and questions.
 
Thank you for all of your continued efforts in collecting and entering SSNAP data which enables exciting opportunities and developing novel ways of improving care with continued collaboration with the RCP, and the new support of King’s.
 
Anthony Rudd FRCP, Clinical Director Stroke Programme, Royal College of Physicians
Professor of Stroke Medicine, Guys & St Thomas’ Hospital
Chair of the Intercollegiate Stroke Working Party