Clinical Audit: An Integral Part of Clinical Governance
Clinical audit is usually the most important and crucial part of clinical governance and can be carried out by any practitioner involved in the treatment of patients since it is not restricted to the periphery of doctors.
It is principally the systematic process of establishing best practice, measuring care against criteria, taking action to improve care for all patients, and monitoring to sustain improvement.
Clinical audit is a process that has been defined as the improvement process related to patient care and outcomes which involves systematic review of care which is subjected to explicit criteria and the implementation of required changes that needs to be made in order to restore quality of care provided to the patients.
In other words it can be described as the measurement of practice against certain agreed standards and hence implementing change to ensure that all patients receive care to the same standard.
There are various topics one can consider while opting for a clinical audit.
These may be a high risk practice, patients' concerns, cost effectiveness, trust/Board/Agency Priorities, and local concern, commissioning national guidelines and new treatments or procedures.
Now if we talk about the procedure for conducting a clinical Audit there are various process involved in this.
At first, the problem or issue must be identified i.
e.
the selected topic or issue must be audited.
This step also includes the measurement of adherence to healthcare processes that have produced the best outcome for patients.
Then the criteria and standard of the audit are likely to be defined.
The decisions regarding the overall purpose of the audit should be written as a series of statements or tasks that the audit will focus on.
The next step involves collection of data.
To ensure the precision of this collection certain details of what is to audited must be established from the outset.
These may include the user group to be included, the healthcare professionals involved in the users' care and the period over which the criteria apply.
The clinical audit must be clarified and edited before concluding.
The audit is analyzed whereby the results of the data collection are compared with criteria and standards.
Then it is to check how well the standards were met and in other cases why weren't they.
As soon as the results of the audit have been published and discussed, an agreement must be reached about the recommendations for change which should include who has agreed to do what and by when.
Each and every point needs to be well defined, with an individual named as responsible for it, and an agreed time period for its completion.
Recent developments in clinical audits have been the encouragement of multidisciplinary project work and projects which follow the path of the patient across the primary and secondary care interface.
Clinical audit is a tool for generating evidence required for individuals and teams of professionals to demonstrate that their practice and procedures meet standards.
It is principally the systematic process of establishing best practice, measuring care against criteria, taking action to improve care for all patients, and monitoring to sustain improvement.
Clinical audit is a process that has been defined as the improvement process related to patient care and outcomes which involves systematic review of care which is subjected to explicit criteria and the implementation of required changes that needs to be made in order to restore quality of care provided to the patients.
In other words it can be described as the measurement of practice against certain agreed standards and hence implementing change to ensure that all patients receive care to the same standard.
There are various topics one can consider while opting for a clinical audit.
These may be a high risk practice, patients' concerns, cost effectiveness, trust/Board/Agency Priorities, and local concern, commissioning national guidelines and new treatments or procedures.
Now if we talk about the procedure for conducting a clinical Audit there are various process involved in this.
At first, the problem or issue must be identified i.
e.
the selected topic or issue must be audited.
This step also includes the measurement of adherence to healthcare processes that have produced the best outcome for patients.
Then the criteria and standard of the audit are likely to be defined.
The decisions regarding the overall purpose of the audit should be written as a series of statements or tasks that the audit will focus on.
The next step involves collection of data.
To ensure the precision of this collection certain details of what is to audited must be established from the outset.
These may include the user group to be included, the healthcare professionals involved in the users' care and the period over which the criteria apply.
The clinical audit must be clarified and edited before concluding.
The audit is analyzed whereby the results of the data collection are compared with criteria and standards.
Then it is to check how well the standards were met and in other cases why weren't they.
As soon as the results of the audit have been published and discussed, an agreement must be reached about the recommendations for change which should include who has agreed to do what and by when.
Each and every point needs to be well defined, with an individual named as responsible for it, and an agreed time period for its completion.
Recent developments in clinical audits have been the encouragement of multidisciplinary project work and projects which follow the path of the patient across the primary and secondary care interface.
Clinical audit is a tool for generating evidence required for individuals and teams of professionals to demonstrate that their practice and procedures meet standards.
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