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What is it?

Clinical audit is a way to find out if healthcare is being provided in line with standards, and lets care providers and patients know where their service is doing well, and where there could be improvement.

The key stages in a clinical audit are:

1. Identify a topic that it is important to audit.

2. Establish the authoritative standards against which to audit.

3. Develop audit criteria that will measure performance against the agreed standard.

4. Collect and analyse data and report results.

5. Reflect on results and agree and improvement plan.

6. Implement the improvement plan.

7. Repeat the data collection to measure improvement.

What kind of clinical audit do we undertake in Cardiff and Vale UHB?

We carry out 2 types of audit;

  • Local clinical audit- these are clinical audits conducted within a specific service to investigate a local issue or assess clinical practice against a specific standard. Clinical teams must register their audit with our clinical audit team.  Once registered the clinical audit team will assign a database project reference number and monitor the progress of the project. All project results and any recommendations for change in practice are forwarded to the department to ensure that comprehensive records are maintained and to enable inclusion in the next annual report.
     
  • National Clinical Audit -National Clinical Audits are mandatory audits set out by Welsh Government which all health boards must participate in. They cover a wide variety of different clinical topic areas such as Asthma, Breast cancer, Chronic Obstructive Airways Disease (COPD), Bowel cancer and Maternity care just to name a few.

The National Clinical Audit and Outcome Review Plan (NCAORP) is published by the Welsh Government (WG) annually. This plan is one of the foundation cornerstones in the drive to improve the quality and safety of healthcare in Wales. It sets out in detail how findings from national clinical audit projects and outcome reviews are to be used to measure the quality and effectiveness of the healthcare provided to patients and to assess year on year improvements. The plan also details the full list of national audit projects that all healthcare organisations must fully participate in, where those services are provided.

The UHB comply with the requirements of WG by participating in all mandatory national clinical audits. Annual published audit reports are reviewed by the patient safety and quality assurance manager in conjunction with the lead clinician and results drive improvement work in focussed areas. We report all our National audit results through our Quality and Safety, Experience Committee annually to give assurance that we are compliant with the quality standards set out by each.

 

 

 

 

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