What is Clinical Audit?
NHS Boards aim to deliver high quality treatment to all patients with cancer in the West of Scotland, ensuring equity of care across the region. To do this, regular assessment of how well services are delivered across the region must be undertaken. Clinical audit is a process which allows those providing treatment and care to assess how well this is being done and to identify where improvements in service delivery and patient outcomes could potentially be made.
Clinical Audit Process
The clinical audit process involves recording details of what treatment and care is provided, where treatment is delivered and when. This data is recorded for every patient with cancer in a standardised and structured way allowing the Network to compare performance and quality of services across the region over a period of time. Audit staff within the four West of Scotland NHS Boards work closely with clinicians to ensure data is of high quality, focusing on data completeness and accuracy of reported results.
Performance Measurement
The information produced from the audit is assessed regularly by the Network and identifies where treatment and care might be changed to improve patient outcomes. The Network assesses performance by measuring against recognised quality outcome measures.
In 2010, the Scottish Cancer Taskforce established the National Cancer Quality Steering Group to take forward the development of national Quality Performance Indicators (QPIs) for all cancer types to enable national comparative reporting and help drive continuous improvement for patients. In collaboration with the three Regional Cancer Networks and Public Health Scotland (PHS), the first QPIs were published by Healthcare Improvement Scotland in January 2012 and implementation for all cancer types was complete by 2014. Data definitions and measurability criteria to accompany the QPIs are available from the PHS website.
QPIs were developed to ensure activity is focused on areas to improve survival and patient experience, ensure effective and efficient delivery of care and reduce variance across Boards and Regions. They enable robust measurement of the quality of clinical services and are kept under review and revised as necessary as further evidence or data becomes available.
Service Improvement
Continuous service improvement relies on clinical audit data; therefore, patients being treated by the Network now are contributing to the improvement of services provided to patients who are diagnosed with cancer in the future. These audit data are considered by the Network to be highly confidential and great care is taken to ensure that data are safely and securely held. Access to the data is restricted only to those involved in recording the data and to a very small group of staff employed to analyse these data.
Safe Use of Data
The Network Information Governance Framework has been developed to ensure that the rigorous controls, processes and working procedures required to ensure safe and secure handling and storage of data are in place and that the information produced from processing these data is communicated in line with local, regional and national governance arrangements.
Further information regarding how information is collected and used in the NHS is available via NHS inform.
Annual audit reports are available on this website under ‘Reports and Publications’ for each tumour-specific Managed Clinical Network (MCN).
Last Updated: 12/05/2023