Audit and its uses
Audit is a tool for directly improving healthcare outcomes and ensuring patient care is provided in line with best practice standards. Other acceptable uses that take a more indirect path to improvement are to gather data that demonstrates clinical outcomes, to compare practice between different services/individuals, to inform and assure patients, to provide a reserve of information that can be used for research, to enhance the status of a specific intervention or area of practice through providing evidence of outcomes, to inform clinical practice on a longer term basis, to gather information to maintain patient safety, to inform commissioning and policy and to measure and improve equity of care (HQIP, 2011).
Current audit projects
- Prevention of AKI and hypersensitivity reactions in adult patients undergoing iodinated CECT (reporting stage)
- Radiology reporting of osteoporotic VFFs on CT (reporting stage)
- Peer review, peer feedback and REALMs (data collection stage)
Forthcoming audit projects
2023
- Emergency imaging
- Actionable reporting and communication of radiology reports