BACKGROUND Outbreak investigation is a core function of public health agencies. Suboptimal outbreak investigation endangers both public health and agency reputations. While audits of clinical medical and nursing practice are conducted as part of continuous quality improvement, public health agencies rarely make systematic use of structured audits to ensure best practice for outbreak responses, ...

OBJECTIVE To explore and describe the implementation of the Royal College of Nursing's approach to audit--the dynamic standard setting system--within the current context of health care, in particular to focus on how the system has developed since its inception in the 1980s as a method for uniprofessional and multiprofessional audit. DESIGN Qualitative design with semistructure interviews and ...

Audits and quality improvement projects are vital aspects of clinical governance and continual service improvement in medicine. In this article we describe the process of clinical audit and quality improvement project. Guidance is also provided on how to design an effective audit and bypass barriers encountered during the process.

Delivering quality in the NHS is not a new concept. However, the recent focus on clinical governance has resulted in the need for effective methods of systematically reviewing quality. Clinical audit is a tool that has been created for this purpose. This literature review assesses the benefits of clinical audit and critiques the nurse's role in the process, addressing any barriers to their invo...

The Government's proposals for the reform of the National Health Service' have met with a mixed response. Amidst the controversy one item has received widespread support. Increasingly it is recognized that medical audit is an essential component of high quality clinical practice, and the United Kingdom can no longer lag behind countries such as the United States, Australia and the Netherlands2 ...

Objective—To review the literature on the benefits and disadvantages of clinical and medical audit, and to assess the main facilitators and barriers to conducting the audit process. Design—A comprehensive literature review was undertaken through a thorough review of Medline and CINAHL databases using the keywords of “audit”, “audit of audits”, and “evaluation of audits” and a handsearch of the ...