Audit: how to do it in practice (29 May 2008)

Summary

Junior doctors can find the process of doing an audit helpful in gaining an understanding of the healthcare process—Andrea Benjamin, BMJ's clinical editor, explains how to do one.

Content

Key points

• Audit measures practice against performance.
• The audit cycle involves five stages: preparing for audit; selecting criteria; measuring performance level; making improvements; sustaining improvements.
• Choose audit topics based on high risk, high volume, or high cost problems, or on national clinical audits, national service frameworks, or guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
• Derive standards from good quality guidelines.
• Use action plans to overcome the local barriers to change and identify those responsible for service improvement.
• Repeat the audit to find out whether improvements in care have been implemented after the first audit.