The Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) programme is a national programme designed to improve the quality of care within the NHS by reducing unnecessary variation in services. By sharing good practice and new approaches between trusts, GIRFT identifies changes that will help improve care and patient outcomes, as well as delivering efficiencies such as a reduction in unnecessary procedures and patient length of stay, and the consequent cost savings.
The GIRFT methodology has been applied across more than 40 surgical and medical specialties and cross-cutting themes including diagnostics, day case surgery, outpatient services and clinical coding.
Each workstream is led by one or more frontline clinicians who are experts in the specialty they are reviewing.
GIRFT clinical leads for urology
Mr Kieran O'Flynn
Consultant Urological Surgeon
Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust
Mr John McGrath
Consultant Urological Surgeon
North Bristol NHS Trust
Mr Joseph John
Urology Specialty Trainee
South West Deanery
GIRFT collaborates and works in partnership with NHS trusts, specialist clinical professional bodies (Royal Colleges and societies), and partner NHS organisations in collating, scrutinising and sharing data, highlighting both underperformance and excellence. This evidence has a major impact in identifying variation in clinical outcomes and has provided the focus for hospital teams, departments and clinical networks to tackle unwarranted variation, where it exists, through benchmarking and adopting best practice.
GIRFT works closely with professional organisations to provide a wealth of co-badged pathways, guidance and operational insight to enable strong and informed leadership in improvement. Resources to support improvement in urology can be found here.
GIRFT’s work benefits the NHS through improved productivity, efficiency and capacity, which in turn benefits patients, who can receive treatments quicker, have more equity of access to high quality care, and have better outcomes.
More information on GIRFT’s work and methodology can be found on the programme’s website by clicking the link below:
Open the GIRFT website in a new browser window
GIRFT resources
Pathways & service guidance
Clinical pathways
** Includes: Haematuria, retention of urine, testicular trauma, renal trauma, urethral trauma ± pelvic fracture, ureteric injury, penile fracture, priapism, catheter problems, epididymo-orchitis, suspected renal colic & "same-day" ESWL for stones
Service guidance
| Improving functional reconstructive urology & urogynaecology service delivery |
View the PDF |
| Urology Area Networks (UANs) |
View the PDF |
| Urological INvestigation Units (UIUs) |
View the PDF |
| Developing urology services post COVID-19 pandemic |
View the PDF |
| Strategic framework for post COVID-19 urology services |
View the PDF |
| Guide to UEC & SDEC |
View the PDF |
| Guide to preoperative testing: urine testing before elective urological surgery |
View the PDF |
| Guide to transurethral laser ablation (TULA) for bladder cancer |
View the PDF |
Outpatient transformation templates & guidance
| Overarching guide to urology outpatient transformation |
View the PDF |
| Advice & guidance (A&G) template responses |
View the PDF |
| Patient-initiated follow-up (PIFU) template pathways |
View the PDF |
| Remote monitoring (RM) template pathways |
View the PDF |
| Clinically-led urology surgery outpatient guidance |
View the PDF |
GIRFT national report for urology
The first national report for urology was prepared by Mr Simon Harrison in July 2018.
View/download the 2018 report
Other information
"Further Faster" handbook
The GIRFT Further Faster programme aims to deliver rapid clinical transformation with the aim of reducing 52-week waits. The work brings together hospital trust clinicians and operational teams with the challenge of collectively going ‘"urther and faster" to transform patient pathways, to work towards reducing unnecessary follow-up appointments and to improve access & waiting times for patients.
View/download the handbook
Net Zero and sustainability
Bladder cancer care is the first of many greener pathways to be developed by GIRFT. It is anticipated that this approach will support trusts both in reducing the environmental impact of the NHS and in providing better quality care for patients. The document is a practical guide to "decarbonising" the bladder cancer care pathway
View/download the PDF
Good practice case studies (log-in required)
| Day case rates for urology TURBT at Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust |
View the PDF |
| Management of DNAs at Norfolk & Norwich Hospital |
View the PDF |
| Supporting a culture of continuous improvement using NCIP at Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust |
View the PDF |
| Local anaesthetic transperineal prostate (LATP) biopsies at Sherwood Forest NHS Foundation Trust |
View the PDF |
National Clinical Information Project (NCIP)
The National Consultant Information Programme (NCIP) is an important, online portal providing access to Consultant surgical activity data for key procedures across a range of surgical specialties.
The portal is designed specifically for Consultants, MDs, ROs and specialty clinical leads, providing data insights that support quality improvement for the benefit of patients.
Users can view quality-based indicators such as length of stay, day case rates, conversion rates, readmission rates, complication & revision rates and mortality. Diagnoses and procedures for individual patients are available and filters can be applied to view a specific diagnosis, procedure or surgical approach alongside demographic data such as co-morbidity scores, deprivation levels and ethnicity, thereby providing an enriched picture of the population.
Learn more about the benefits of NCIP
GIRFT data on the Model Health System
The Model Health System (formerly Model Hospital) is a digital information service designed to help NHS providers improve productivity and efficiency. GIRFT is working in partnership with MHS to host GIRFT metrics on the portal, providing valuable insight to helps trusts improve their performance.
NHS staff can sign up with their trust email address using the link below and can view data relating to the performance of their Trust - access requires an initial registration process & subsequent login by clicking the lonk below.
The GIRFT data on the portal is the most up-to-date available, and enables Trusts to gain a deeper understanding of their current performance, together with opportunities for improvement.
Visit the Model Health System website
Coding guidance for clinicians
| Clinician guidance for nephrectomy & nephroureterectomy (Mar 2025) |
View the PDF |
| Clinician guidance for prostatectomy (Mar 2025) |
View the PDF |
| Male bladder outflow obstruction surgery - clinician guidance on procedure coding (Jan 2023) |
View the PDF |
| Urology: outpatient procedure codes (Jan 2023) |
View the PDF |
Published studies for surgical specialties (including urology)
Published studies carried out by the GIRFT team to support surgical procedures can be found on the Studies & Research pages of the GIRFT website - click on the link below and scroll down to view the "UROLOGY":pane.
View the published studies