Why is ANZRAP needed?
ANZRAP is an opportunity to recognise and measure healthcare delivery and quality in order to improve health outcomes, benchmark performance and reduce variations in care. As Australia and New Zealand do not currently have a comprehensive audit program for respiratory care, ANZRAP will establish a world leading bi-national audit program.
How does the ANZRAP research platform work?
Hospitals across Australia and New Zealand are invited to take part in a voluntary audit. The audit period of interest will run from June to August of each year, examining inpatient care and comparing against national and international clinical care standards, with retrospective data entry in September to December.
Respiratory or general medicine departments in hospitals in Australia and New Zealand can participate if they treat patients during acute COPD or asthma admission.
COPD audits will occur 2025 and 2027, and asthma audits will occur in 2026 and 2028.
Benefits for participating sites
Ethics approval in Australia has been obtained. We will support local site-specific governance approval. Each site will be given ANZRAP REDCap access, training and support for data entry, providing a standardised approach to data analysis.
Sites will be provided with individual summarised reports, including reports benchmarked against national standards. All sites will receive de-identified annual bi-national summary reports.
Key Outcomes
We will develop a world-leading multi-disciplinary research program using high-quality hospital audit data from Australia and New Zealand to generate new knowledge regarding the quality of care, clinical outcomes and health service provisions for people with COPD and asthma, raising visibility of respiratory illnesses, supporting advocacy and investment in respiratory health.
Contact ANZRAP
If you would like to become an ANZRAP site or further information, please email any of:
Australia ANZRAP Chair: Prof Natasha Smallwood: [email protected]
New Zealand ANZRAP Chair: Dr James Fingleton: [email protected]
ANZRAP Project manager: Dr Lena Ly: [email protected]
Our Aims
ANZRAP is a new, investigator-initiated research program that aims to provide comprehensive data to:
- Understand prevalence and risk factors for exacerbations & hospitalisations,
- Examine healthcare provision, quality of care, and clinical outcomes,
- Explore variations in healthcare,
- Examine how health care is provided and by whom to people with respiratory, illnesses across Australia and New Zealand,
- Benchmark data against national and international standards.
Our Goals
This research program will describe the current quality of care (including but not limited to access, availability and timeliness) received by inpatients admitted with exacerbations of asthma or COPD, and identify gaps in clinical care delivery against quality indicators described in current and emerging clinical care standards. This work will support and inform future quality improvement projects.
Our Research Program
ANZRAP will create and maintain a secure bi-national audit platform that will be used to perform cyclical audit examining the care received by patients admitted with exacerbations of asthma or COPD in Australia and New Zealand.
ANZRAP will comprise three unique audit datasets, with the capacity to add additional audits (for other respiratory illnesses) over time:
- Adults admitted with an exacerbation of COPD (commencing 2025)
- Adults admitted with an exacerbation of asthma (commencing 2026)
- Health services’ structure and workforce (organisational data) to understand what care is available to people admitted with a respiratory illness (commencing in 2025).
