NICE: Principles for best practice in clinical audit (2002)

Summary

Clinical audit is a quality improvement process that seeks to improve patient care and outcomes through systematic review of care against explicit criteria and the implementation of change. Aspects of the structure, processes, and outcomes of care are selected and systematically evaluated against explicit criteria. Where indicated, changes are implemented at an individual, team, or service level and further monitoring is used to confirm improvement in healthcare delivery.

This book is written primarily for staff leading clinical audit and clinical governance projects and programmes in the NHS. It should also prove useful to many other people involved in audit projects, large or small and in primary or secondary care.

Content

In this book the authors set out two key areas for attention if audit is to play a part in bringing about real improvements in quality of care.

• First, efforts must be made to ensure that the NHS creates the local environment for audit.
• Second, the NHS needs to make sure that it uses audit methods that are most likely to lead to audit projects that result in real improvements.