Blogs

Hear from our Heroes: Student of the Year

Published: 03 Sep 2020

Last year, I was awarded the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership Audit Hero award for Student of the Year. Now, I’m encouraging healthcare professionals to nominate their students for recognition of their quality improvement (QI) work at university.

Hear from our Heroes: Clinical Practitioner of the Year (national)

Published: 02 Sep 2020

For me personally it was a fabulous and unexpected pleasure to have received the award last year. But in reality, this really recognised the great team at the CRANE Database based at the Clinical Effectiveness Unit, Royal College of Surgeons, I had worked with since 2008. It gave the whole team immense satisfaction to think how their work had been recognised by peers for delivering excellence and impacting patient care through the constructive use of data and data linkage.

Hear from our Heroes: Clinical Audit Professional of the Year (local)

Published: 01 Sep 2020

I felt very honoured and surprised to win Clinical Audit Professional of the Year in 2019 jointly with Colin Barnes. I knew I had been nominated but after seeing so many talented clinical audit staff at regional meetings and seeing the amazing work they had produced on the NQICAN forum I didn’t think I had a chance. I am very grateful to my colleagues for the glowing nomination and for the support they continue to give me every day.

Just Say Yes, Please

Published: 10 Aug 2020

At this time last year, to mark the arrival of the next cohort of junior doctors arriving or turning round, I wrote a blog entitled Just Say No. This was to suggest that, on induction with your new educational supervisor, if they suggested getting out 20 sets of case notes and doing an “audit”, that this offer was declined and a more productive quality improvement activity pursued (with the caveat that if the supervisor was to be intimately involved in the notes review, that that would be acceptable).

The Baroness Cumberlege Report – First do no harm (Published 8th July 2020)

Published: 22 Jul 2020

The report of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review (IMMDs) The Cumberlege review has reported on three important clinical areas where harm has occurred; Primodos, sodium valproate and surgical mesh insertion for female urinary incontinence. The review has helped us identify a direction of travel in assuring new medical devices being introduced to treat a wide variety of conditions. The principals are generalisable and I believe we should use these as we develop additional devices registries. 2. This review into the treatment of female incontinence with surgical mesh is specific. It has given us interesting insights into the various vehicles that, in some respects, we take for granted, when holding patients’ data for review purposes; namely data bases and registries. In the course of this work, Cumberlege has defined databases and registries. These definitions, if accepted, can be extrapolated out into other areas where medical devices are implanted and further into other areas of healthcare.

HQIP response to “Institutional Use of National Clinical Audit by healthcare providers.”

Published: 26 May 2020

The recent paper - Institutional Use of National Clinical Audit by healthcare providers McVey L, Alvardo N, Ken J at al. J Eval Clin Pract. 2020;1-8. DOI: 10.1111/jep.13403 - from colleagues looking into institutional use of National Clinical Audit, concluded that there is an imbalance between the benefits to institutions and the required resources for participating in the national audit programme. This study is based on interviews with 16 colleagues, is semi-structured and comes across as relying more on anecdote. There were additional interviews with 32 clinicians, although it is not clear how the findings from these colleagues reflect on the reported imbalance between the national programme and the Boards of Trusts.

Making patient information accessible and bagging a highly-commended award

Published: 14 Aug 2019

The Falls and Fragility Fracture Audit Programme was highly commended in last year’s Richard Driscoll Memorial Award. Their award entry showed how they worked with patients to make information accessible and dynamic. In this blog post, project manager Bonnie Wiles explains more about their approach and what the award means to them.

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