Making Use Of Clinical Audit

Clinical audit is at the heart of clinical governance. Provides the mechanisms for reviewing the quality of everyday care provided to patients with common conditions like asthma or diabetes. Builds on a long history of doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals reviewing case notes and seeking ways to serve their patients better. Addresses the quality issues systematically and explicitly, providing reliable information. Can confirm the quality of clinical services and highlight the need for improvement. Provides clear statements of principle about clinical audit in the NHS.

This volume, developed by the Observatory together with OECD, provides an overall conceptual framework for understanding and applying strategies aimed at improving quality of care. Crucially, it summarizes available evidence on different quality strategies and provides recommendations for their implementation. This book is intended to help policy-makers to understand concepts of quality and to support them to evaluate single strategies and combinations of strategies.

This book is essential reading for all those who undertake clinical audit or are training to do so, including health practitioners, managers and commissioners in the NHS. It will also be useful to patients who contribute to audit governance.

This is an open access book. The book provides an overview of the state of research in developing countries – Africa, Latin America, and Asia (especially India) and why research and publications are important in these regions. It addresses budding but struggling academics in low and middle-income countries. It is written mainly by senior colleagues who have experienced and recognized the challenges with design, documentation, and publication of health research in the developing world. The book includes short chapters providing insight into planning research at the undergraduate or postgraduate level, issues related to research ethics, and conduct of clinical trials. It also serves as a guide towards establishing a research question and research methodology. It covers important concepts such as writing a paper, the submission process, dealing with rejection and revisions, and covers additional topics such as planning lectures and presentations. The book will be useful for graduates, postgraduates, teachers as well as physicians and practitioners all over the developing world who are interested in academic medicine and wish to do medical research.

Clinical audit, the systematic critical analysis of medical care, receives comprehensive and illuminating treatment in this definitive introduction. The authors cover all the knowledge and skills required to implement change in clinical practices based on results of the multiprofessional clinical audit. Discussing various designs for audit projects as well as specific methods of data collection and analysis, the book uses real-world case studies to demonstrate each technique's effectiveness.

This handbook is a definitive, up-to-date, and succinct text covering the legislative requirements, scientific foundations, and clinical good practice necessary for clinical, academic, and healthcare research.