NICE (National Institute of Health and Care Excellence) defines a clinical audit as follows:Audit in healthcare is a process used by health professionals to assess, evaluate and improve care of patients in a systematic way. Audit measures current practice against a defined (desired) standard. It forms part of clinical governance, which aims to safeguard a high quality of clinical care for patientsRecently I’ve had several requests regarding how to audit occupational health practice. The first question to me was 'How on earth do you audit an occupational health service which has never had an audit before? Where do you start?'Here I take you through a simple and pragmatic way of auditing an occupational health service to improve consistency and quality over your whole organisation or maybe just one process which needs modifying.Audit is a daunting task if you’ve never done it before but if you use a stepped approach, it becomes simpler. The hardest part being the planning. If you’ve audited nothing before in your organisation, start with something simple and small.The fours steps are:1. Planning the audit, 2. Doing the audit, 3. Checking against the standards and 4. Action, that is, correcting all the things you've discovered aren't compliant with what you wanted.To illustrate my four step approach, I will go through a clinical notes audit because every OH service keeps clinical notes and, being a paper exercise, will not interfere with day to day work.How to decide what needs auditingFind out what you need to do at each stage and why Issues to avoid and problems which can occurNo long words to confuse you Links to research and the checklist from my website blog which accompanies this podcast: Download the Free Notes Audit Checklist hereRead the full article which accompanies this podcast with much more detail here.Further Reading/Resources to help with Audit:Faculty of Occupational Medicine advice on Data Protection in Occupational HealthSee also SEQOHS website for accrediting your OH services at www.seqohs.orgAudit and audit cycle for Medical Professionals on the Patient websiteBest Practice in Clinical Audit from Healthcare Quality Improvement PartnershipIntroduction to Clinical Audit in OH from my websiteA brief summary of Plan, Do, Check, Act from the HSE

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