BACKGROUND In Tanzania, substandard intrapartum management of foetal distress contributes to a third of perinatal deaths, and the majority are term deliveries. We conducted a criteria-based audit with feedback to determine whether standards of diagnosis and management of foetal distress would be improved in a low-resource setting. METHODS During 2013-2015, a criteria-based audit was performed...

Data processing within large organisations is often complex, impeding both the traceability of data and the compliance of processing with usage policies. The chronology of the ownership, custody, or location of data — its provenance — provides the necessary information to restore traceability. However, to be of practical use, provenance records should include sufficient expressiveness by design...

BACKGROUND Improving the quality of health care requires a range of evidence-based activities. Audit and feedback is commonly used as a quality improvement tool in the UK National Health Service [NHS]. We set out to assess whether current guidance and systematic review evidence can sufficiently inform practical decisions about how to use audit and feedback to improve quality of care. METHODS ...

BACKGROUND There are two dimensions of quality of maternity care, namely quality of health outcomes and quality as perceived by clients. The feasibility of using clinical audit to assess and improve the quality of maternity care as perceived by women was studied in Malawi. OBJECTIVE We sought to (a) establish standards for women friendly care and (b) explore attitudinal barriers which could i...

We propose an approach to post-election auditing based on Bayesian principles, and give experimental evidence for its efficiency and effectiveness. We call such an audit a “Bayes audit”. It aims to control the probability of miscertification (certifying a wrong election outcome). The miscertification probability is computed using a Bayesian model based on information gathered by the audit so fa...

Election audit procedures usually rely on precinctbased recounts, in which workers manually review all paper ballots from selected polling places, but these recounts can be expensive due to the labor required. This paper proposes an alternative audit strategy that allows machines to perform most of the work. Precincts are recounted using recounting machines, and their output is manually audited...