For those who work in clinical audit, New Principles of Best Practice in Clinical Audit is often referred to as our 'bible'
. Most clinical audit and QI teams will probably have at least one copy tucked away, but I suspect that with all the recent HQIP guidance plus endless quality improvement literature, a fair few copies will have been gathering dust.
If that is the case, we urge you to grab a cuppa and spend 5 minutes flicking through the book. If you do you will rapidly find many gems that are perhaps more relevant today than ever before!
The very first line of the book stresses that ‘clinical audit is a quality improvement cycle’. No talk of assurance and no talk of one-off measurements! This is followed up with the purpose of clinical audit… ‘designed to improve quality in healthcare’. Wouldn’t it be good in 2019 to do an audit of audits and see how many projects improve the quality of healthcare? Place your bets!!!
‘Clinical audit is very often the single best method of ensuring that the care which is provided is in line with best practice’…. Amen… ‘there is also the risk that underselling clinical audit will starve it of willing participants’… has this happened in the last decade? We must remember that this comment was made before national audits were made mandatory! In recent times we would argue that the value of local clinical audit has been undersold by the people at the top. And those working in other QI methods have definitely stole a march on audit in recent years with impressive publicity campaigns.
‘Clinical audit is a discipline that is applicable to any profession’. Never a truer statement, but national audits remain steadfastly narrow in terms of their scope. Where are the national audits for professionals working in care homes, prisons and hospices in 2019?
We will leave you with this… ‘clinical audit… however tiresome some aspects of its methodology may be, is quite simply the best way of knowing that you are good at what you do. We have to recapture this as a virtue, bottle it and sell it to practitioners’.
There you have it… they were my highlights from 5 minutes reading over a brew. Let us know what jumps out at you if you re-visit the book…