Clinical audit: descriptive studies

How to use the service

You need to create the right environment for an audit so that your team are receptive to any recommended changes. To do this, you need: facilities like technical support and time a culture that values creativity and openness a willingness to report and investigate errors and failures without fear The stages of clinical audit are: Preparation Selecting criteria Measuring performance Making improvements Sustaining improvements The choice of criteria depends on the audit, but criteria should preferably be: explicit related to important aspects of the outcome your service or product is trying to achieve (consult your product model) measurable Criteria can be based on guidelines or evidence reviews. If that is not possible, criteria can be based on professional consensus. The audit may focus on: structure (what you need) processes (what you do) outcomes (what you expect) For example, consider a video consultation service: structure criteria could cover whether healthcare professionals in a service have access to the technology they need, such as appropriate devices and internet connection speeds process criteria could cover what practitioners have done – for example, have they completed a record of the consultation appropriately? outcome criteria could cover a patient’s health status or satisfaction – for example, you could look at patient ratings of the consultations Audit often involves benchmarking: comparing the service’s performance to similar services, particularly the most successful ones. When making comparisons across providers, it’s important to consider that one provider may have worse outcomes because they are working with users with greater problems rather than because they are providing a worse service. Audit will often use routinely collected data. You will need to consider your sampling strategy and relevant selection criteria, including the time frame. Data collection often uses clinical records, but you should recognise their limitations. Collecting dat