I've just watched a video on YouTube called Audits v QI and I felt a bit sick. The presenter, see here, said he would get rid of clinical audit, a profession and methodology that’s been established for years… decades… centuries; an area I work in, my job! I love working in clinical audit and someone wants to get rid of my team; of all the people I know in the field and of all the hard work, not just carried out by my team, but by thousands of clinicians.
I took some deep breaths… just like I had to when my trust set up a QI team. Don’t I work in QI? Who are these people, why are they paid more than me? Why do they work in a nicer environment than me? Why is their team getting more exposure than mine?
More deep breaths…I felt angry and sad, threatened and underappreciated.
More deep breaths…
The doctor in the video and the executive with the power to create a new team all have the same vision as me and my clinical audit colleagues, we all want to see improvement. I don’t think the way to do that is to ‘get rid of’ or ignore clinical audit; but to make clinical audit work more effectively.
The doctor in the video is right; he says ‘you are meant to re-audit’. Then he says QI is lots and lots of audits happening together. He goes on to say we never complete audit cycles and then audits go on a shelf and aren’t shared. So why not make sure we re-audit and share audits rather than get rid of clinical audit?
Our executive team was right, we need to improve and invest in improvement; so why not invest a little of that in clinical audit? I feel like clinical audit needs to step up to the challenges and not sit in a corner. We need to work with our improvement teams because we share the same vision. Audit v improvement is unhelpful, more audit for improvement!