It is great to be back! After 82 days in hibernation, Clinical Audit Support Centre have re-opened for business and that means that we can resume this blog. To be honest, while we have missed writing our weekly / bi-weekly blogs, the truth is that a short rest has done us the world of good!
I’m sure all of us have been learning about ourselves during these strange and unprecedented times. COVID19 is obviously a horrible virus that continues to impact pretty much everyone on the planet, but the pandemic has also forced us all to re-look, re-evaluate and reflect on how we lead our lives.
Interestingly, one of the biggest learning points for the CASC team over the last 12 weeks or so, has been the importance of taking a break and getting out of common routines. A good example for us has been Twitter. As a business we use Twitter regularly and typically tweet every day. Frankly it has been a revelation to have a prolonged Twitter holiday! It has been utterly refreshing. Away from it, you realise that unless you are getting hundreds of re-tweets and likes, Twitter isn’t a big deal. We used to think 20 likes or re-tweets was amazing, but if you look at Twitter in more detail then that’s just insane! Now we are back we’ll be using Twitter again and we feel re-invigorated. But we will certainly be having more Twitter holidays in the future! Try it… turn Twitter off for a week and we guarantee you’ll feel better.
It has been the same for various forums and websites we use. Trust us, limiting use is the way forwards. A weekly visit is much more productive than a daily one. I guess that we all inevitably go into auto-pilot mode and click on the same stuff we usually look at most weeks, but actually jolting yourself out of the normal routine is really worth doing. Over the last 12 weeks I’ve changed my default homepage every week. It always used to be the BBC. Simply changing to other news outlets across the globe has proved really interesting and much more beneficial. Until you do it, you don’t realise how much of a malaise you are in. And as all of us working in clinical audit and QI know… change is good whereas sticking with the status quo isn’t. And as the old adage goes ‘a change is as good as a rest’!
On a final note… thanks to everyone who has emailed or tweeted us during our time away. It feels special to know that people value our contribution. Before the end of July, we will publish our first proper new blog, looking at the importance of networks.
That’s all for now. Back soon.
PS As ever we are more than happy to publish guest blogs. If you’ve been working in clinical audit/QI and you’ve been redeployed during the pandemic, then we’d really like to hear about your story.