Our Clinical Audit Strategy 2015 – 2020
What is our strategy?
The clinical audit strategy 2015 – 20 sets out Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust approach to clinical audit. The strategy has been developed to reflect, ‘Our 2020 Vision’, the new strategy for the Trust which describes what will be done over the next five years to improve services for patients.
Our 2020 Vision:
Outstanding care and treatment you can be confident in.
The clinical audit strategy is for those who hold responsibility for the completion, direction and the development of clinical audit within the organisation and for those who use our services who expect a quality service which monitors improvements.
About clinical audit
Clinical audit is a process for service development and improvement. It uses the evidence of what works well for patients and makes them safe, compares this to how we provide care and services and then, most importantly, results in making changes or improvements when necessary. Feedback from the recent Care Quality Commission Inspection at the Trust showed, ‘the Trust is clearly committed to using clinical audit as a measure of how services are performing.’
How we want to improve
We collect information about how we provide care for people who use our services and use this information to make sure that improvements are made and learning about good practice is shared with everyone. We also use clinical audit and service evaluation to understand the value of innovative and new ways of working. This is a powerful way of informing how to develop services and research programmes.
We want to build on this, making sure that we apply these methods to those things which are important to patients. We want to make sure that we work with partners to do this, ensuring that clinical audit is used to consider best practice across all areas such as the physical and mental health of people.
Our goals
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Goals
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Our 2020 Vision
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Clinical audit strategy
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One
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Deliver safe, effective and consistently high quality care
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Annually plan and deliver a clinical audit programme
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Two
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Local joined up patient care
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Work with patients and those who commission our services as part of pathways of care.
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Three
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Put research, learning and innovation into practice
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Put learning from clinical audit into practice
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Four
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Be the provider, employer and partner of choice
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Train staff and patients in clinical audit and enable staff to use clinical audit for revalidation
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Five
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Living within our means
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Clinical audit resources will be used effectively
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How we will put our strategy into practice and how we will know we are on track with it
Goal 1 - Our clinical audit forward plan will reflect the national audit programme, the Trust business objectives and topics for innovation and development. This will include the national confidential inquiries into suicide and homicide, the national physical health and schizophrenia audits, the national audit of dementia and the Prescribing Observatory for Mental Health (POMH) audits. Local projects will reflect priorities for innovative development and research such as psychosis, mood disorders, dementia and eating disorders in children and young people.
The clinical audit team will support staff to ensure that all audits are completed to a high quality and timely fashion. Activity will be monitored and reported regularly and an annual report completed each year.
Goal 2. – All local clinical audit projects will consider involving patients in the audit process. This will increasingly use patient expertise to prioritise projects and co-design methodologies. The Commissioning for quality and innovation (CQUIN) clinical audit projects agreed with our commissioners will always take priority in our planning.
Each year we will see an increase in the clinical audit projects which involve patients directly and commissioners will receive timely, high quality reports for all CQUIN audits.
Goal 3 – All clinical audits will have an action plan to ensure improvements are made to the quality of patient experience as a result of the clinical audit findings. The clinical audit team will work closely with healthcare staff to monitor and support implementation of the action plans for each audit.Actions for sharing learning from good practice will be monitored in the same way.
All clinical audits will have an action plan which is implemented. Improvement activity will be reported regularly. Re-audit will show improvements to the quality of patient experience. The activity and improvement will inform on-going development of operational services including the new Care Development Services (CDS) and Clinical Academic Groups (CAGs).
Goal 4 – The clinical audit team will deliver a programme of clinical audit training which will enable patients to be involved in clinical audit. Staff will learn how to apply clinical audit in practice and use the information in a way which will ensure safe and effective standards of patient care.
Healthcare staff will incorporate clinical audit activity into their development time and special professional activity time. We will see an annual increase in the number of people trained in clinical audit. Staff will meet the revalidation criteria of their professional bodies for clinical audit and patients will be able to use clinical audit to improve the things that are important to them.
Goal 5 – All clinical audit projects will be prioritised according to the criteria for prioritising topics in the Trust clinical audit policy. This will ensure that clinical staff use their development time on areas of need. The corporate clinical audit team will continue to provide good value for money compared to other similar Trusts.
We will see a decrease in the number of projects which do not demonstrate improvement to the quality of care as a result of clinical audit.