Clinical Governance - Auditing

Clinical Governance is the NHS's focus on constantly improving care through research and audits. The NHS have an obligation to account for the quality of their services through systematic and critical analysis of the standards of their clinical care. They are accountable to fix any deficiencies within the NHS.

There are elemental differences between research and audit which we'll now look at.

Both research and audit start with a question, use formal data collection through appropriate methods and designs, and then expect the answer to influence practice. Both improve professionalism and define good practice.

Research

Research is a fundamental aspect of providing evidence based practice, to ensure that the practice Healthcare professionals undertake is relevant, it is crucial to continuously advance professions and the protocols we adhere to, in order to provide optimal patient care. Research is usually one off, it can allocate patients into random treatment groups which can use placebos or new treatments, and can disturb the patient beyond their clinical treatment.

Audits

Audits, however, are on-going and doesn't disturb the patient at all. Audit provides development of professional education and regulation within the NHS, it increases care, accountability, motivation, inter-professional working and clear assessment of need. Audits support our status as autonomous professionals.

Structure

1. Set out a clear criteria 
2. Clear standard assessment
3. What's it's relevance to clinical practice? (reference to literature to justify) *Why?
4. Preparation and planning *How? *What? *Who?
5. What are the proposed changes?
6. How successful was the audit?
7. How successful were the changes?
8. What did you learn?
9. Where does the department go from here?
10. REPEAT



 Audits are not about performance appraisal, needs assessment, research, competition between departments/professionals, statsitics or disciplinary actions. Audits just assess

"What should be happening?

"Is this happening?

"Why not?

"How can we improve this?

Within your departments there should be clinical governance and audit committees which meet regularly and have high numbers of participants (according to the RCR)