INTRODUCTION Prescribing Observatory for Mental Health (POMH-UK) runs national audit-based quality improvement programmes open to all specialist mental health services in the UK to help improve prescribing practice in discrete areas. AIMS The baseline sample and this re-audit represent the largest audits of antipsychotic prescribing in PWLD that have been conducted to date; and thus provide t...

Audit is becoming an increasingly important tool for use in medical practice under the auspices of clinical governance, and the expectation for trainees to participate in audit is increasing. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health recommends that specialist registrar trainees perform yearly audit during their training and audits performed during Higher Specialist Training form part o...

Recent guidelines recommend that where appro priate, procedures for the development of audit in medicine and professions allied to medicine can be replaced by comprehensive multidisciplinary audit of services. The Royal College of Psychiatrists (1990) suggests that clinical audit, involving the work of other staffin the multidisciplinary team, is preferable to purely medical audit. Given the im...

objective: to clarify the principles of a safe delivery based on clinical governance criteria, as recommended by the pertinent experts. materials and methods: the current study was part of a qualitative research conducted by content analysis method in 2013 and purposive sampling, performing 24 in-depth interviews based on semi-structured questions and analyzed using thematic content analysis. t...

BACKGROUND Teaching clinical audit skills to nascent health professionals is one strategy to improve frontline care. The undergraduate medical curriculum at the University of Auckland provides improvement science theory and skills in Year 5 teaching, and the opportunity to put this into practice during an Obstetrics and Gynaecology (O&G) clinical attachment in Year 6. In 2015, a revised medical...

BACKGROUND Cardiovascular disease accounts for a large burden of disease, but is amenable to prevention through lifestyle modification. This paper examines patient and practice predictors of referral to a lifestyle modification program (LMP) offered as part of a cluster randomised controlled trial (RCT) of prevention of vascular disease in primary care. METHODS Data from the intervention arm ...

BACKGROUND The challenge of an ageing population and consequential increase of long term conditions means that the number of people requiring palliative care services is set to increase. One UK hospice is introducing new information and communication technologies to support the redesign of their community services; improve experiences of existing patients; and allow efficient and effective prov...

BACKGROUND We performed a clinical audit of preoperative rectal cancer treatment at two European radiotherapy centres (Poland and Spain). The aim was to independently verify adherence to a selection of indicators of treatment quality and to identify any notable inter-institutional differences. METHODS A total of 162 patients, in Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) 68 and in Greater Poland Can...