Latest News
After Action Review training and resources
After Action Reviews (AAR) are rapidly gaining momentum in healthcare, not least since the AAR approach was listed as a possible learning response by NHS England within the 2022 Patient Safety Incident Response Framework documentation. AARs are conducted as team-based facilitated meetings that help staff understand why care has not gone according to plan. However, AARs can also be used to review any event (not just patient safety incidents) and they can focus on positive and negative experiences. We are working with our illustrator to create a bank of useful posters to help promote AAR and the first is available here. In addition, we are collaborating with Healthcare Conferences UK to provide AAR training. Please join us on this highly rated development course on 25 September, click here. You can also learn more about AARs via our AAR Masterclass on 14 June. All the details are available here.
Clinical Audit Census Report is now available!
In Summer 2023, the Clinical Audit Support Centre partnered with Audit Management and Tracking (AMaT) to carry out the first ever clinical audit census. A total of 39 organisations kindly provided detailed feedback on their local staffing arrangements for clinical audit. This report looks at the data supplied by 34 NHS organisations and examines: how many staff each organisation employ to facilitate clinical audit, what the clinical audit ‘team’ is called, who has responsibility for clinical audit in the organisation and what support clinical audit staff provide. In addition, the census focuses on clinical audit job titles and relevant pay bandings, plus participants have shared comprehensive details of the challenges they currently face. This initial 24-page report will be followed up with a more detailed report later in 2024, but the initial findings are interesting and insightful. To download your copy, click here.
New resources to help promote clinical audit
We are delighted to be able to keep updating resources that we have designed and created (often with the help of our brilliant illustrator Amy Bradley) that help promote the value of clinical audit. We are determined to ensure that clinical audit is seen as a quality improvement methodology that makes a real difference to the care of patients and not a boring, tick-box exercise. With this in mind, we are building on our established resources by releasing two new images that help promote the value of clinical audit. The first plays on the view that clinical audit is a tick-box exercise and is available here. The second links to the clinical audit work of Florence Nightingale and is available here. In addition to our new resources, we have created short films that demonstrate the value of clinical audit. The one-minute offering is available here with the longer version available here. We have also created a poster which explains how valuable clinical audit professionals are, available here and a poster that demonstrates why national clinical audits are important, available here. All these resources can be freely used. However, they must not be adapted without our permission and CASC must be acknowledged when they are utilised.
Request your CASC information pack
CASC have developed an electronic brochure that provides you with more details of the work that we support. There are lots of examples of how we can support clinical audit and quality improvement projects, plus the brochure includes sections on: accredited training, consultancy, patient safety work, help we provide to staff in primary care, case studies, clinical audit awareness week, etc.
Take a look at ‘stuff CASC like’
The CASC team like to keep as up-to-date as possible and we enjoy examining a wide range of materials and resources. This ‘stuff we like’ section does what it says on the tin! We will re-fresh this section of our homepage approximately every month and our aim is to focus on highlighting useful and ideally less mainstream materials that those working in audit, QI and patient safety will find stimulating and useful.
Get a copy of CASC’s latest jobs bulletin
Since 2009 the CASC team have diligently searched through the NHS Jobs website to identify current clinical audit and clinical effectiveness vacancies. From this information we produce our weekly clinical audit jobs bulletin and typically this is released every Monday. By producing this document, we aim to save local audit staff looking for new opportunities lots of time.