'It's all about quality improvement now'.... 'the Trust have appointed lots of new QI staff on higher salaries than the clinical audit team'.... 'clinical audit is in decline'...
Sound familiar? These are certainly regular sound-bites for us here at the Clinical Audit Support Centre. Of course, we don't hear these comments everywhere we go, but in recent years there has been a constant narrative that QI has been attracting the lion's share of funding and resourcing.
Now that may be true... but we have some interesting news for you. Since we set up our weekly clinical audit jobs bulletin (available every Monday via www.clinicalauditsupport.com) we have been mapping the number of audit vacancies advertised on NHS Jobs website every month. And if you know the first thing about SPC charts, then you will S-P-C that the number of clinical audit vacancies is on the up! Indeed, since May 2015 you will observe that the number of monthly vacancies has sat almost continuously above the mean-line. And what's more if you focus on the last 6 months, you will see we have recorded the most vacancies in any 6 month timeframe with the exception of the last 6 months of 2015.
It is not for us to interpret this data... but we just wanted to share the information we have collected and mapped out.
PS If you are interested in using SPC to chart your data then we recommend the work of NHS Improvement. For more > https://improvement.nhs.uk/resources/making-data-count/
