Streamline your sales audit process for healthcare with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

[Music] hi everyone welcome to this week's tour audit in healthcare helpful for any Healthcare professional students on quality improvement modules you may be an early career nurse asked to be part of an audit to conduct an audit or you might be observed in an audit and wonder what it's about also if you have an interview you may be asked what is an audit cycle and how does it inform quality improvement in practice so this video is for everybody lots of helpful tips and I hope you find it useful do give me a thumbs up on YouTube if you do and do check out my other videos so firstly what is the clinical audit clinical audit is a process to measure the quality of care to establish whether change is required so this is how it links to quality improvement and change in practice clinical audit measures the effectiveness of Health Care against agreed evidence-based standards of good practice so if you're asked in an interview what is an order it's about looking at what we're currently doing making a judgment and evaluating whether current practice meets the standard set the standard expected then the audit data that's analyzed will inform future quality improvement actions so you either keep what's in place you sustain good practices or you need to implement change to improve standards whatever the audit outcome you always go back and you reorder as standards can improve or fall so there are different types of audits methods and audit tools two key types of retrospective audit and prospective audit retrospective order is where the data is already available before the audits begun so for example data is stored on electronic database electronic health records are searchable for example for specific criteria such as patient data Interventional treatment or care pathway data so for example you could audit from referral to cancer treatment and then we have prospective audit where data is collected at the time to give the team feedback on its current performance so a simple example would be hand hygiene audit where staff are observed in clinical areas using hand washing techniques over a set time and their hand washing technique will be compared with the national protocol for hand washing and the results will then be expressed as a percentage of time that hands are cleaned by staff using good hand hygiene in the UK we also have local and National clinical audits so an example of a local audit might be a documentation audit on award versus a National Audit such as the national diabetes audit and that order is considered to be the largest annual clinical order in the world the national clinical audit and patient outcome program is commissioned and managed on behalf of NHS England and the healthcare quality improvement partnership hqip and they currently currently we have more than 30 National audits related to the most commonly occurring conditions so there's a National Audit on dementia a National Audit for care of end of life for example so it's important to check on these National websites for current audits in your field especially if you're applying for jobs there's a National Audit on epilepsy for example and if you're applying for an epilepsy specialist nurse or a medical or Allied Healthcare professional role you might be asked questions relate into Audits and clinical standards so do check out the NHS website and the healthcare quality improvement partnership website Healthcare quality improvement partnership is a partnership an independent organization led by The Academy of Medical Royal colleges and the Royal College of Nursing and National voices so they have a wealth of information on their websites so as a registered nurse for over 34 years I've been in the position of being observed during an audit I have been a board sister where results have come back to me or I've conducted audits myself as an educator and taught people about audit and there's some key principles linked toward it the first is that it's a continuous and cyclical audit process so once you've completed one audit it's informed actions you should return as part of the audit cycle to monitor future improvements or there may be faulting standards the second is the audit results should be transparent don't change results because they were unexpected or not what you expected so you need to keep to what the data says and be true to the data audit should not be confrontational or judgmental it's not an opportunity to name shame blame managers or a service or the team or a person it's an opportunity to learn from data to improve practice to educate and to work on quality improvement actions as a team so you should use a collaborative and team approach to support the team to support the nurse lead who might be quite shocked or upset with the result of an audit for example and that's how you will improve and change in the future so before I go through the practical application of audit and the audit cycle I have four videos on my YouTube channel that you might find helpful there's a video on how audit is different to research and to quality improvement and service evaluation there's a video on quality improvement and quality assurance with an overview of key terms especially helpful for interviews and then two videos practically explaining using change management or quality improvement models so I hope you find those helpful so you'll see different cyclical models for audits Burgess the town 2011 presented a very simple four-stage model that has evolved into a five or six stage model but they're very similar with Burgess a towel the first stage is preparing and planning um the first stage involves deciding what your area of focus will be for your audit what are your aims what are your objectives what criteria are you going to use to measure and evaluate the standards the second stage is measuring performance where you actually conduct an audit and you analyze the data the third stage is to implement change depending on the analysis of data and the audit results and then you have stage four which is sustain improve and re-audit so you would sustain good practice for example if the results were good and you would aim to implement Improvement if there was areas to improve and later reordered so I mentioned the five-stage audit cycle you might see a six stage even but they're very similar to Burgess a towel's um model and I have a reference for Burgess italic the final slide on this talk you will see these models on NHS websites on employer websites as well so an example of a five-stage model stage one would be prepare for audit stage two select criteria stage three measure performance stage four making improvements and stage five sustaining improvements so if we look at some practical application and some key tips first thing is preparing so you need to look at your topic your aims and objectives so to help you choose your topic it really depends on the objectives what you're trying to achieve with this audit and also is it a priority for the organization because you're going to need to get authorization to do to conduct an audit is there good evidence to inform criteria and the standards for example is there a systematic review or national clinical guidelines in the area it's very helpful to contact the local audit office and many employers have their own audit office if they're a large Healthcare trust for example but there's also National leads that you could contact potentially linked to audit is the audit planned already or has one been conducted recently do they have an audit or an already established audit tool or audit protocol you can use so networking with local and National Audit leads is very helpful State clearly what you want to measure so for example there may be some poor record keeping that you're noticing as a manager in an area and you want to do an audit to improve the standard of record keeping with nurses or the aim might be to achieve a hundred percent compliance in surgical hand antisepsis in theater areas for example it just depends on what your focus is so the second stage selecting criteria in the standard expected for your audit it's helpful to look at clinical practice guidelines you might want to develop your own tool audit tool or performer but it must be underpinned by a current evidence base and looking at those National practice guidelines national service Frameworks the National Institute for health and clinical Excellence has some guidelines and evidence-based guidelines you've got the clinical Effectiveness and evaluation unit of the Royal College of Physicians and the key is to set measurable goals within set time frames for your audit that are underpinned by an Evidence base and and current national standards so it's part of the second stage it's important to define the criteria and the standard for an audit so what will be your minimum standard what will be the optimum standard and there needs to be discussion and consensus with the other members of the team as to what the minimum standard should be because you can't analyze your data without defining that standard and the standard is usually as a percentage to help analysis so an example would be it would be appropriate to aim for the standard to be a hundred percent compliance with surgical hand antisepsis to prevent surgical infections whereas it might be lower if it is linked to waiting times and referral times you'll see some standards that are set 80 in a specific area food for example so once all the hard work's been done you've prepared your performer you then will measure performance using an audit performer to collect data that will be informed by your established guidelines and protocols and the key thing to think about is defining numbers and times so you need to be clear on how many observations for example that you'll conduct as part of this audit how many data records need to be audited also how long what time periods are you going to be doing the audit over so if you're doing observations is it just going to be an afternoon is it going to be on Alternate days is it going to be over a few months similarly with auditing records how far back will you go you're going to go about six months a year over five years you're then collecting and analyzing data um you when you're analyzing the data it's looking at how well the standards were met where they met were they not met what percentage but also looking at reasons potentially for why the standard wasn't met and that that analysis is very important and drawing conclusions from the audit data will inform future actions so the four stage make Improvement is very important for impact and there's no point having Audits and audit data if you're not going to inform future actions so data collection is not going to make an impact unless you follow it up present your data you disseminate your results to the team and then collaboratively agree recommendations creating a plan is important so you've got actions with timelines to support change and improve current practice or it may be that it's about sustaining current good practice and linking those timelines to assigned action so people are responsible for completing actions is important too so the final stage sustaining Improvement you could do that through repeating audit to find out weather improvements or actions have been implemented after the first audit and evaluating what was worked what didn't work to determine whether there's future improvements needed in actions are needed so repeating the audit is important but also deciding how often do you repeat it monthly it could be annually it very much depends on the context and whether there was concerns found on an audit for example learning from others is very important sharing good practice through audit feedback but also sharing quality improvement strategies that you've used as part of an audit and Publishing your work I don't think enough Healthcare professionals do publish on quality improvement projects or service improvement projects and audits but it's helpful to share good practice as well so if you're a student Healthcare professional I would encourage you to try and get some placements with any clinical governance or audit leads in your profession if you've got interviews coming up or assignments coming up there's some very helpful information locally and nationally check out your employer websites and just put in audit NHS websites there's the national clinical audit and patient outcome program as I mentioned earlier Healthcare quality improvement partnership website talk to people in your clinical audit departments because they coordinate audit activity and bring together the results of audits for NHS trusts for example and clinical governance needs clinical audit needs quality improvement hubs as well are very useful so I have some helpful references here for anyone with assignments or interviews coming up and do put any questions in the YouTube comments and if you want to contact me you can DM me on Twitter my website and do check out my other videos and I hope you found it helpful today