Study Guide – Clinical Audit
Stage 1 - Deciding what to audit
Identifying problems, choosing a topic
Choose a subject that you consider to be important or significant.
| Ways of spotting audit topics | Examples |
| Important clinical events | Admissions for asthma |
|
“Significant events” |
Patient died of MI – no record of smoking history or BP |
| Patients' complaints | Too long to get an appointment |
| Observation | No system for ensuring bag drugs up to date |
| Observations of staff | Patient on Warfarin not had INR for 6 months |
|
NICE subjects |
Post-MI patients on aspirin |
Tips
- Choose something that interests you.
- Check with others that would be involved with making changes – do they agree with your proposal? This is important – you won’t get changes made if you don’t carry people with you from the start.
- There’s no point in auditing something that you think is already being done well – you will find plenty of problems that need to be sorted out first!
Setting priorities
You may come up with a number of possible subjects to audit.
To help yourself prioritise, ask yourself:
- Is the problem common?
- Does it have serious consequences?
- Can I do something about it?
Next page: Setting audit criteria
Back to: "Audit Contents" page
Last update: 16 February 2007