#CAAW blog: Diary of an audit lead day 5 – the lows and highs of serving the NHS
Published: 13 Nov 2015
In the fifth and final Clinical Audit Awareness Week blogs, Michael Spry (Countess of Chester Hospital FT audit lead, Mersey Clinical Audit Network chair and NQICAN member) gives his views on the lows and highs of working in the NHS
So, its Friday. The weekend beckons. It’s more than welcome this week after another early start to travel down to London for Patient First.
My colleague, our Compliance Manager, Dean and I have presented the work we have done in moving our audit management and registration onto Datix, so we can manage it alongside our incidents, claims and complaints, and move towards ‘triangulating’ it all together (can you triangulate when you have four points? Probably not).
It’s a privilege to be able to share work with the wider NHS, and to learn more, as I touched upon in my Wednesday blog. But its tiring. As the NHS tightens its belt we are working harder. The requirement for assurance and quality improvement doesn’t diminish, so audit staff continue to up their game. This week has evidenced to me, from recording my movements on Twitter as a rough experiment, how much work there is ‘on the go’. My team are working hard, and I know it’s the same for all of you.
But going back to the ‘standing on the roof of the hospital’ analogy, when I stand back and think about it, it’s been another interesting week showing me yet more slices of NHS life. So tired as I am, getting to see a cross section of the mighty beast that is the NHS in action for another week isn’t too bad a life is it? Thank you for reading my blogs this week – if nothing else, I’m hopefully a decent cure for insomnia.
Have a good weekend everyone, and well done for a great Clinical Audit Awareness Week – it’s a pleasure to work with you all.
Michael