This article covers key aspects of quality medical care for patients. The basis of modern approach to improve the care quality is clinical guidelines, clinical audit and registers of diseases. The development of evidence-based medicine ensures that the personal experience of physicians ceases to be a leader in the treatment of patients. Evidences of emerging studies of interventions that are ef...

Over the last twenty years the NHS has been coming to terms with a plethora of initiatives designed specifically to improve the quality of clinical practice. The names have changed frequently as new groups of management gurus have come up with remixes of old tunes. One set of activities has been about determining and prescribing what to do and how to do it. Approaches such as evidence-based med...

or t o re fe r re co m m en da tio ns f or im pr ov em en t to t ho se r es po ns ib le a nd a cc ou nt ab le fo r th e se rv ic e. Cl in ic al D ire ct or /S er vi ce M an ag er /T ea m L ea de r ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... si gn at ur e d at e si gn at ur e d at e Cl in ic a...

Objective Timely access to holistic multidisciplinary care is the core principle underpinning management of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Data collected in national clinical audit programmes fundamentally aim to improve health outcomes of disease, ensuring clinical care is equitable, safe and patient-centred. The aim of this study was to develop a tool for national audit of JIA in the UK...

BACKGROUND Audits are often performed to assess the quality of clinical trial data, but beyond detecting fraud or sloppiness, the audit data are generally ignored. In an earlier study, using data from a nonrandomized study, Shepherd and Yu developed statistical methods to incorporate audit results into study estimates and demonstrated that audit data could be used to eliminate bias. PURPOSE I...

The recent review by Martin McKee' makes several important points but also raises one issue which needs further discussion. This concerns the definition of "routinely collected data" which he proposes: "data whose primary reason for collection is other than audit." It is implicit in the paper that the definition refers to data which are collected regularly and over an extended period. However, ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the abilities of doctors to interpret neonatal cranial ultrasound scans. DESIGN AND SETTING High resolution scanned images of six important neonatal cranial ultrasound abnormalities were posted as a questionnaire to the 59 neonatal units in the North and South Thames regions. RESULTS Forty two questionnaires were returned (71%). Currently 56% of those interpreting crania...