Flying the Flag for Clinical Audit

With Clinical Audit Awareness Week (#CAAW19) now less than 2 months away (w.b 25th November) – its great to see the excitement beginning to build across our community as we prepare for the most important week of the year for Clinical Audit.

With the increasing focus and importance of Quality Improvement (QI) in the NHS growing almost daily – it is important that we make sure Clinical Audit is an integral part of this. Whilst this might seem an obvious statement to Clinical Audit enthusiasts – disappointingly we heard from our members survey*1 earlier this year that this wasn’t always happening in some organisations and that QI teams are forming across the country with little or no integration with Clinical Audit. Indeed one member reported that their trust had two QI departments! So it is important that we use CAAW (along with every week of the year) to fly the flag for Clinical Audit and go back to basics and remind people why we do Clinical Audit (to improve patient care) and that it is a QI process. To further make the point we are encouraging colleagues to share their successes via our forum where clinical audit has made a difference to patient care and we will be sharing the best during CAAW and holding a public vote to decide the winner with a suitable prize going to the winners to enhance the patient experience.

Today with our colleagues at HQIP – we have launched the search for this years clinical audit heroes – a competition that has been the cornerstone of CAAW for the last few years. Following feedback last year we have revamped the competition and it is now expanded to cover 5 different categories (see banner above).  We often find that Clinical Audit professionals and leads are busy behind the scenes delivering the clinical audit programme as resources are stretched so the awards are a great opportunity to shine the light on our NHS unsung heroes and fly their flag. To help promote the awards and Clinical Audit in general we have produced a minute long video on our Youtube channel – please share it with your colleagues and lets work together to share, learn and celebrate clinical audit.

Link to Video for Clinical Award Heroes awards

Further details on the Clinical Audit Heroes is available via HQIP website

As with CAAW18 – our Networking and Sharing Forum (NNSF) will be a pivotal platform to share resources, your plans and successes so please visit our CAAW19 pop-up forum when you have a minute. We now have nearly 900 members and over 2000 clinical audit and other QI related posts on the forum which was 2 recently (see below) so please join if you haven’t already. 

Look forward to hearing about your clinical audit heroes and successes soon.

Regards

Carl Walker

N-QI-CAN Chair

*1 The results of our survey are available on the NNSF. We will be sharing further results and details of how we have used the data collected during CAAW.