With just under 6 weeks until the start of Clinical Audit Awareness Week, we are once again using the blog to focus on what now seems to be known as #CAAW19. It’s a Twitter thing if you didn’t know! But in all seriousness, if you aren’t using Twitter to keep tabs on audit/QI and awareness week then you are seriously missing a trick as that is where the news drops and where most of the action seems to be!
If you refer back to our previous blog on #CAAW19, we effectively challenged those in the audit community to step-up-to-the-plate and get involved. This blog focuses again on awareness week... but we think raises an important point.
You’ll probably be aware that once again HQIP are asking for nominations for audit heroes and this year they seem to have taken this to the next level with five different categories on offer. By the end of November, HQIP will have announced audit professional of the year, student of the year, clinician of the year, volunteer of the year and team of the year. Please do get your nominations in by the 1st November 2019 deadline here. NQICAN also seem to be busy this year with a short #CAAW19 inspired cartoon here, they are encouraging NNSF members to take a look at their #CAAW19 pop-up forum where members can access resources and share ideas. Find out more, here. We’ve also seen various other initiatives (mainly via Twitter) being set up by local and national audit teams. It is great to see so much going on and so much effort being put in ahead of #CAAW19.
And yet… we have to admit, that something seems missing. And looking back over previous years, it is something that nags away at us a bit. While we totally support the opportunity to use #CAAW to celebrate our work, promote our teams and bestow audit hero status on the lucky winners, we seem to be missing an important opportunity. While we as audit professionals expect the clinicians who we work with to use audit to measure their care, reflect and make improvements, audit awareness week seems to avoid real honest widespread debate on how audit is actually doing. Surely it is imperative we use #CAAW19 to audit clinical audit and to consider what action can be taken to stimulate real change for the benefit of all.
National audit is a case in point. If you take a look on the aforementioned Twitter or NNSF it won’t take long to track down pretty negative feedback on some national audits. Our annual CASC survey conducted since 2010 produces the same feedback on NCAs each year – too burdensome, poor methodology, long waits for results/reports, few NCAs for some sectors etc - but we don’t use CAAW to discuss NCAs and think seriously how we could do better by making simple and constructive changes and improvements. Same for local audit…
Let’s use audit proactively as part of #CAAW19 by openly discussing what is working, what is not and what could be better. Let’s get talking about what changes (the key part in the audit process according to Prof. Richard Baker) could and should be made. Most of all let’s use audit to bring about some much-needed improvements.
CASC hope to help with this… as part of #CAAW19 we are handing over this blog to guest authors, so if you want to write a thought-provoking article that is less than 500 words then please get in touch. We have also created a placard encouraging those working in audit and QI to tell us what one change they would like to make to improve audit. You can access that here and we will award a prize for what we consider to be the best answer tweeted out during #CAAW19. Let’s use #CAAW19 to get some real debate going, that includes the leaders from national audits, NHS England and HQIP!