The Society for Acute Medicine (SAM) Benchmarking Audit (SAMBA) is a national benchmark audit of acute medical care. The aim of SAMBA is to describe the severity of illness of acute medical patients presenting to Acute Medicine, the speed of their assessment, their pathway and progress at seven days after admission and to provide a comparison for each participating unit with the national average (or ‘benchmark’).

SAMBA normally takes place at least once a year. Data are collected for patients admitted over a 24-hour period, with follow up of clinical outcomes. The dataset consists of an audit of a day in Summer 2023, and compares SDEC service structure, services and patient level data for >35,000 patient attendances at 188 hospitals in the UK. This data are from the largest evaluation of medical SDEC to date.

It includes 9,612 patients in the Society of acute medicine benchmarking audit dataset- containing unit structure and staffing levels, patient demographics (age and gender), SDEC admission details and investigations, severity of illness at presentation using an early warning score (e.g. NEWS2), frailty and pathway of care through the hospital and readmission. The data was collected on 22-06-2023.

Geography: Recruitment to SAMBA audits are open to all hospitals in the UK receiving acutely unwell medical patients. Non-acute and community hospitals were excluded. The SAMBA dataset draws on contributions from across all four nations of the UK. In 2023, patient data on SDEC attendance was submitted by 140 hospitals in England, 6 in Northern Ireland, 4 in Scotland, 9 in Wales, as well as 1 in Jersey.

Data set availability: Data access is available via the PIONEER Hub for projects which will benefit the public or patients. This can be by developing a new understanding of disease, by providing insights into how to improve care, or by developing new models, tools, treatments, or care processes. Data access can be provided to NHS, academic, commercial, policy and third sector organisations. Applications from SMEs are welcome. There is a single data access process, with public oversight provided by our public review committee, the Data Trust Committee. Contact pioneer@uhb.nhs.uk or visit www.pioneerdatahub.co.uk for more details.

Available supplementary data: To supplement the national audit data, PIONEER can provide more granular, longitudinal patient-level insights. This includes matched controls, ambulance and community data, and unstructured data (such as images).

Available supplementary support: Analytics, model build, validation & refinement; A.I. support. Data partner support for ETL (extract, transform & load) processes. Bespoke and “off the shelf” Trusted Research Environment (TRE) build and run. Consultancy with clinical, patient & end-user and purchaser access/ support. Support for regulatory requirements. Cohort discovery. Data-driven trials and “fast screen” services to assess population size.