Welcome to our first blog of 2020! Happy New Year to you! May the next 12 months bring everything that you desire… and most importantly, keep you happy and in good health.
Blog wise, it seems only right that our first offering for 2020 focuses on some initial results gained via our tenth annual clinical audit survey. If you are not aware of this, where have you been? Only joking! In a nutshell we set up the online survey in 2010 and it proved an instant hit, so we decided to keep it going. And we are glad that we did as we are now able to compare results for most questions year-on-year. Classic #plotthedots if you will. And just to say, this work is entirely reliant on feedback from audit and QI professionals… what can we say to all 100+ respondents that we have had every year other than ‘thank you’, ‘respect’ and ‘we are ever indebted to you’?
We've just released interim results and as ever we will endeavour to provide a complete report as soon as possible. At the moment, it is very much the time to pick out a few top-line results. With this in mind, what are the ‘highlights’ that need further consideration? What are the results from the latest survey (data gathered in Nov/Dec 2019) that stand out…?
The truth is…. drum roll please…. there aren’t really any NEW headlines from the recent survey. That doesn’t mean there is NO NEWS. Indeed, what we have for the latest batch of results is a bit of a dream from a researcher’s perspective…. a continued consistency of data. SPC experts will tell you to fear data that bounces all over the place, there is simply no hint of that for our 2019 data. For our survey, in most cases a 5-year old would be able to interpret the ongoing trends!
Take feedback on national clinical audits as per the graph shown. Over the ten years the data lines don’t even come close to overlapping. ‘Moderate’ is always the top answer in response to ‘how would you rate NCAs’ and this shows no signs of changing. If we map out results looking at how well we involve patients in clinical audit (a question added in 2012), we see a remarkably similar picture with three lines not coming close to intersecting each other. In the last 12 months we can report a small drop in the number rating patient involvement as ‘poor’ (good news), but it is hard to get excited with 5 consecutive surveys rating patient engagement as ‘good’ at under 5%. Given the constant recent focus on patient engagement, that is truly depressing news.
Returning to national audits… every year we ask ‘what is the most effective NCA’ and for ten consecutive years we have had one winner: the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme or SSNAP. Great news for SSNAP to have no peers, but surprising in some respects that no other NCA has dethroned SSNAP since 2010.
If you want to read the interim results, please click here. They illustrate, by and large, how consistent the numeric results continue to be year-on-year. Of course, we have not had much time to analyse the data, so let’s not write off finding a seismic result. And next week, let’s take a look at some of the free-text feedback. The legendary Don Berwick suggests ‘measurement is a poor man’s conversation’ and we are inclined to agree. Numbers are useful, but they often don’t enable us to see the real picture or tell us what people are actually saying. Next week we will use the blog to look at the WORD on the street!
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