Latest News
CASC head into third decade
The Clinical Audit Support Centre are delighted to announce that Summer 2026 marks our 20 years in business. We can’t quite believe that CASC were set up back in 2006 when the PM was Tony Blair and ‘I don’t feel like dancin’ by the Scissor Sisters topped the UK charts. Upon leaving the NHS in 2006, Stephen and Tracy were proud to be the first team to offer accredited qualifications in clinical audit - we tip our hats to the thousands of you that have studied for our courses and gained qualifications over the last two decades. We continue to provide best practice resources for clinical audit and offer challenge where we identify sub-standard delivery. It is a special feeling to be embraced and supported by the audit and QI community with many of you coming to us over the years to share your challenges and frustrations. We have also enjoyed broadening our portfolio of work to focus on QI methodologies and patient safety techniques. To celebrate our 20 years in business we are offering 20% off all our courses and e-learning resources until the end of 2026. Please contact us for more details.
National news: uncertain time for clinical audit
2026 has proved a worrying time for many professionals working in clinical audit and our recent survey with Healthcare Quality Quest (see Learn at Lunch section) highlights that local clinical audit teams are shrinking. Added to this, NHS England chose to dismantle our 25 years old NQICAN national network over the Summer without any consultation (read more here) replacing it with the HQIP led NCA-ACE network that is only open to NHS staff and suppliers of national audits. The useful NQICAN pages on NHS Futures website have been mothballed with the regional networks left to fend for themselves with no central support or funding. Additionally, feedback on NHS England’s flagship Clinical Audit and Registries: A best practice guide that took 18 months to compile has been very mixed. CASC overview of this document is available here. Stella Vig is sadly no longer leading on clinical audit at NHS England plus The Sunday Times recently published an excellent article raising serious questions concerning the way NHS England manage national clinical audits. The article sits behind a pay wall but can be obtained by searching LinkedIn or X for the relevant journalist, Shaun Lintern.
Join our new courses
We are delighted to announce that we have expanded our portfolio of courses in 2026. With so much focus placed on maternity services in recent years and following the second Ockenden Report that highlighted poor quality clinical audit at Nottingham University Hospitals, we are partnering up with Sharon Clarke from Northamptonshire to offer our new accredited one-day training course for those auditing maternity services. The course will examine best practice in clinical audit with emphasis on maternity care with learners able to study for our associated Level 3 qualification. The first course runs on 14 September. More details are available here. In addition, we have created a new online course focusing on best practice in conducting After Action Reviews (AAR). Evidence suggests AARs have proved to be the most popular PSIRF learning response and yet many staff state they have only received limited training in AARs. Our interactive online course enables learners to work at their own pace, download bespoke materials and gain a thorough understanding of how to lead and participate in AAR meetings to help improve patient care. To find out more, click here.
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.