Clinical audit is about improving the quality of care. Clinical audit is conventionally considered as a cycle with a number of key elements including:
- Determining what the standard is for practice
- Measuring practice
- Improving practice to approximate to the accepted standard
- Re-measuring practice
Clinical audit has many potential uses in clinical practice, including:
- Improving the quality of care - the results of audits should be reviewed within departments and used to inform efforts at service development.
- Audit as part of routine practice - the increasing development of information technology within the NHS provides the opportunity for routine clinical data gathering to feed into audit processes
- Getting the patient’s perspective - increasingly clinical audit is developing to ensure the patient’s perspective is included in assessing the quality of service provided.
- Training - Clinical audit provides an opportunity to learn the principles of literature searching and critical appraisal as well as issues of data collection and change management.
- Revalidation - the Government White Paper “Trust Assurance and Safety” proposes that audit should play an important part in revalidation. It will be important that clinicians participate in audit and demonstrate that they have reflected on the outcomes of audit.
RCP hosted collaborative audits
These audits are host and centrally co-ordinated by the RCP.
External collaborative audits
These audits are run in partnership with the RCP.