26 January 2012
New moves to provide more consistent and detailed reports for national clinical audits is strongly welcomed by the Royal College of Surgeons as clinicians will be able to make better decisions on how to improve services and patients will have better information about differences in quality of care. The guidance by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership, the umbrella body responsible for overseeing clinical audits, wants all audits to follow similar reporting styles with greater transparency and public access and sets medicine firmly on the road to clinician-level outcome reporting.
Professor Norman Williams, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: “Surgeons have been at the vanguard in producing publicly reported outcome measurement in recent years with examples such as the Cardiac Surgery Database, National Hip Fracture Database, National Joint Registry, Vascular surgery audit, and national audits for bowel and oesophagogastric cancers. Time and again it has been shown that when a form of surgery gets a publicly available audit that compares the health outcomes between hospitals and surgeons then quality has gone up. Good quality audit enables hospitals to readily compare how they are doing and learn from the best.”
The announcement from HQIP can be seen here
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Notes to editor:
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