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Clinical Audit and Governance

'Don't regard clinical governance as just another project or a superficial makeover. It is a root and branch transformation of the way clinical care is provided by the NHS'.

Professor Sir Liam Donaldson
Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health

A public inquiry into paediatric cardiac surgery services at Bristol Royal Infirmary was carried out in 1998, after complaints were made about patient care. As a result of this process, the UK Government developed initiatives to set, maintain and improve clinical standards within the NHS.

Clinical Audit is a process involving the systematic, critical analysis of the quality of health care provided. It uses information collected in a number of ways to determine that the right interventions are undertaken, on the right patients, in the right way and at the right time. The overall aim of clinical audit is to improve patient outcomes by improving professional practice and the general quality of services delivered. This is achieved through a continuous process where healthcare professionals review patient care against agreed standards and make changes, where necessary, to meet those standards. Above all, clinical audit is a professionally lead process, core to the improvement of standards of health care delivery, a process that can be facilitated or enabled by the application of sophisticated computer software. Such audit can be undertaken at local or at a national level and can be repeated in an iterative method, to ensure that changes have been made and that quality of patient care is continuously improved.