Principles For Best Practice In 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 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 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.

With the NHS committed to making quality the centre of treatment, clinical audit - a proven and effective process for measuring quality and driving its improvement - has never been a more topical issue. Now thoroughly updated and rewritten, this new edition describes the process by which health professionals, managers and other NHS staff can assess the standard of care they deliver and how closely it corresponds with recommended best practice. It sets out the key principles of clinical audit practice, detailing advances in recent years such as simplified and accelerated audit, improved patient involvement, attention to ethics and methodology and the embedding of clinical audit in organisational governance as well as clinical practice. 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. Reviews from the first edition: This book should be available in all trusts and recommended to those of both junior and senior status who are about to invest time and energy in an audit project.' MEDICAL PROTECTION SOCIETY [W]ell-structured with summaries set out as key points throughout. The appendices give invaluable information on numerous websites for clinical guidelines, on clinical audit and clinical governance.' PHYSIOTHERAPY JOURNAL

By reading and assimilating the information in this handbook professionals, involved in clinical audits and practice development, will be able to design, plan and implement an audit project for patient care in line with up-to-date evidence.

Advances in medical, biomedical and health services research have reduced the level of uncertainty in clinical practice. Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) complement this progress by establishing standards of care backed by strong scientific evidence. CPGs are statements that include recommendations intended to optimize patient care. These statements are informed by a systematic review of evidence and an assessment of the benefits and costs of alternative care options. Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust examines the current state of clinical practice guidelines and how they can be improved to enhance healthcare quality and patient outcomes. Clinical practice guidelines now are ubiquitous in our healthcare system. The Guidelines International Network (GIN) database currently lists more than 3,700 guidelines from 39 countries. Developing guidelines presents a number of challenges including lack of transparent methodological practices, difficulty reconciling conflicting guidelines, and conflicts of interest. Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust explores questions surrounding the quality of CPG development processes and the establishment of standards. It proposes eight standards for developing trustworthy clinical practice guidelines emphasizing transparency; management of conflict of interest ; systematic review-guideline development intersection; establishing evidence foundations for and rating strength of guideline recommendations; articulation of recommendations; external review; and updating. Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust shows how clinical practice guidelines can enhance clinician and patient decision-making by translating complex scientific research findings into recommendations for clinical practice that are relevant to the individual patient encounter, instead of implementing a one size fits all approach to patient care. This book contains information directly related to the work of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), as well as various Congressional staff and policymakers. It is a vital resource for medical specialty societies, disease advocacy groups, health professionals, private and international organizations that develop or use clinical practice guidelines, consumers, clinicians, and payers.