NCIA Awards

2025 National Clinical Impact Awards 

The 2025 round will open 1 April 2025 and close at 5pm on 27 May 2025. To help applicants prepare, ACCIA has published the indicative timelines and updated guidance. This can be accessed on our gov.uk page. 

2025 process and policy changes 

Following consultation with stakeholders through a series of focus groups in Autumn 2024, we have taken onboard feedback and made changes to processes and policy for the 2025 awards round. These changes will apply to applicants employed in both England and Wales. 

Changes include: 

• Changes to employer citations - Employers will no longer have to write citations for every applicant. Instead, employers will answer a short series of yes or no questions to verify the applicant is meeting their contractual obligations, have been truthful in their application and whether there are any investigations and sanctions in place. We will continue to provide the space for employers to detail any concerns they may have but this information will only be available to the central ACCIA team who will investigate any issues raised. Employers will also now be asked about their organisation’s CQC rating. 
• Changes to the CQC/Healthcare Inspectorate Wales section – regulators ratings will no longer be requested from the applicant. Based on feedback received in the focus groups, this question will now sit under the employer verification stage. However, applicants are still free to detail how they have contributed towards their organisation’s CQC/HIW rating under the domains section. 
• Changes to how payments are made - From 2025 onwards, all new awards will be granted from 1st April the year following application (i.e. awards in the 2025 round will start 1st April 2026). This differs from the prior process of backdating award payments for the first year.

New applicants successful in the 2024 round will still receive backdated payments as the new rule will only apply to the 2025 awards round and subsequent years. 

ACCIA hopes this change will bring positive results by providing greater consistency. It aims to simplify the administration of awards at both the central and employer levels. Additionally, it will enable applicants to undertake better financial planning, as they will have a clearer understanding of the amount of money subject to tax in a given financial year - an advantage not available when awards where backdated. 

Please contact ACCIA on accia@dhsc.gov.uk if you have any questions on how these changes may impact you.

Update from Medical Director, Kevin Davies:

some statistics about the 2024 award round and how things have changed since the scheme was reformed, and while we cannot share the full dataset until it has been cleared for publication, we can share some important highlights:

• Success rates over the last three award rounds have been c.48%
• First-time applicants can receive any level of award, and in every round since 2022 we have had applicants with no prior national award getting a top level NCIA
• Applicants who work less than full-time receive the full award value, provided they work a minimum of 3 PAs
• The diversity of applicants and awardees is increasingly comparable with the consultant workforce as a whole, although we recognise more needs to be done
• Volunteering as a regional sub-committee member is an excellent way for prospective applicants to gain insights into what a good application looks like

As usual, for the 2025 award round we have published applicant and employer guidance to help explain how the process works and what to include in an application. We have also produced the attached summary information to act as a first introduction for applicants, giving them an overview of what assessors are looking for when scoring an application and the importance of the different elements of the guidance. We would be extremely grateful if you could share this with your members.

We will be publishing our annual report covering the 2024 award round as soon as we are able, and all the previous reports are available to download. Finally, ACCIA relies upon our volunteer regional sub-committee members who assess every application submitted to us. Attached is our recruitment pack for prospective members which we would appreciate you sharing with your networks if possible. Scoring applications is an excellent away for those considering applying for an award to better understand the system, and we also need lay and employer members for each of our sub-committees.

Thank you for your engagement with ACCIA and the national award scheme, if there is any further information that would be useful please contact us.

ACCIA Secretariat   accia@dhsc.gov.uk