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COVID-19 Lockdown: week 3 round-up


Welcome to the third QI blog that we are releasing during the coronavirus lockdown. Can we all believe that the lockdown commended on 23 March? For us it seems a lot longer ago than two weeks! Another strange 7-days and sad to report that since our last blog the number of deaths recorded has increased from just over 1,000 to over 7,000. And in the last week we have seen a number of doctors, nurses, care workers and others succumb to the virus. At time of writing our Prime Minister is in intensive care. The statisticians and experts appear to be suggesting our lockdown is working and there was heartening news of no new deaths or internal cases of COVID in China. That said, the last week has shown us that not everyone is getting the message, most notably the Scottish Chief Medical Officer (sorry that should read: ‘the EX-CMO’), Catherine Calderwood!

As with last week, let’s commence by picking up a few key familiar themes. Once again, it is brilliant to be able to report on the expert and vital work being carried out by the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre. Their audit of COVID-19 patients is a shining example of how clinical audit can make a real difference and provide useful data. In the last week almost 1,500 patients have been added to the audit data set, bringing the total at time of writing to 2,249. This features data from a minimum of 210 units and the most recent report can be accessed here.


On the subject of national clinical audits, we note that the initial letter by HQIP published on 27 March has been updated and you can access the letter published on 2 April here. We note via communications from the HQIP website that they have closed their London offices and staff are now working remotely. It will be very interesting to see if HQIP (as a non-NHS company) will choose to furlough staff in coming weeks, especially given the suspension of NCAs. One slight disappointment is that HQIP and their staff are currently very, very quiet on Twitter at present. There have been a small number of re-tweets but few little new information of note. It appears that Carl Walker and NQICAN are taking the national lead on clinical audit during the pandemic.


Bringing us neatly onto NQICAN, we note that they are using their blog (click here) to post new coronavirus updates. Their forum now has a dedicated COVID-19 section and you can find out more here. For those who may have missed it, NQICAN have also just released their 2018/19 annual report, available here. This appears to have been significantly delayed but it is worth a read to better understand the aims, activities and accountabilities of the national network. We look forward to seeing NQICAN objectives for 2020/21 and the 2019/20 annual report. Hopefully with 7-days protected time now allotted to the NQICAN (as opposed to just 2 in 2019) we will see a much more rapid release of key documents.


As in previous weeks we carried out another Twitter poll last week. The latest asked for details of the current working arrangements for audit and QI teams. The final results were: 47% redeployed to undertake other work, 42% continuing to carry out audit/QI and 11% other (sadly those who answered ‘other’ did not provide more information. This provides us with a useful picture of what is happening, although we are slightly surprised that more audit and QI staff aren’t being redeployed to help in the battle against COVID-19.

Finally, in terms of focusing on local audit and QI teams as part of the pandemic, special praise this week to East London NHSFT’s Quality Improvement Programme. We would recommend that you follow them via @ELHT_QI. At a time when Twitter is surprisingly quiet, @ELHT_QI have been shining beacons of light. In April alone they have shared information on QI charts and written a QI Essentials blog. They also have an excellent illustrated guide to quality improvement (available at a cost of £10).

That is all for this week. Stay safe and see you in 7 days or so for our next COVID-19 roundup.

P.S Not sure how but we almost forgot to mention details of the PPE national audit. If you aren’t aware of this, then it was featured in the Health Service Journal last week. The relevant link is available here.


SNEAK PREVIEW: next week’s blog will focus on e-learning opportunities.

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