Our Services A - Z - Quality Improvement & Clinical Audit Department

Clinical Audit is a key process in a cycle of continuous quality improvement, through the review of care/services provided against evidence based standards.  In order to assist this process the Quality Improvement & Clinical Audit (QICA) Department provides a wide range of support and advice to Trust staff, both clinical and non-clinical, who are involved with an audit project (at National; Regional or Local/Trust level), or undertaking a user survey (to both staff and patients).

The QICA team have a broad knowledge of:

• Quality Improvement/ Clinical Audit issues
• Sampling methodologies
• Advanced Access and Excel
• Basic root cause analysis
• Basic statistics
• Report writing

They can assist with:

• Planning a quality improvement or clinical audit project
• Design of an audit tool
• Interpreting and analysing data
• Producing a presentation
• Provide a written report of findings
• Provide a certificate of completion

Clinical audit measures and improves compliance with guidelines, compliant care will help achieve better patient outcome; this in turn will save on costs, meet patient needs and help prevent harm.

The QICA team will also register Surveys and provide support where possible for projects where clinical data alone is not enough.  These surveys will be reviewed at registration and planning to ensure the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are fully adhered to.

The NICE compliance Coordinator provides evidence of the Trusts compliance with NICE guidance.  The evidence will be reviewed by the Chief Executive on a quarterly basis via the Clinical Effectiveness Council and this will also be inspected by the CQC. The NICE coordinator will also provide the same project support as the QI facilitators for some projects specifically measuring against NICE guidance.

Whiston Hospital has been an active member of the Trauma Audit & Research Network (TARN) since 1994; the TARN database is the largest trauma database in Europe.

The national registry holds information on more than 500,000 injured patients and provides a statistical base to support clinical audit. The performance of each Trust is shown on the TARN website where sites are measured against various standards relating to trauma care.  Whiston`s performance is shown to be consistently high, both clinically and in terms of data quality.

In 2015, Whiston Hospital was peer reviewed by the national peer review team for Major Trauma.  The Trust was highly commended in numerous areas including the excellent team approach to TARN data collection, how well data is used to affect change and the range of audits that had been completed at Whiston using the TARN dataset.

In January 2021, the Trust was reviewed by the Cheshire & Mersey Major Trauma Network which found to very successful.