Using your health records to improve healthcare – Clinical audit in St. Patrick’s Mental Health Services
What is clinical audit?
Information held in your health records can be used to assess the quality of the care you have received against nationally and locally agreed best practice standards of care. The results of this assessment can then be used to make changes and improvements to the care we provide to our service users. This process is known as clinical audit. Your confidentiality is ensured throughout this process.
What is the purpose of clinical audit?
St. Patrick’s University Hospital aims to provide you with the highest quality of health care. To do this we must keep records about you, your health and the care we have provided or plan to provide to you. These records may be used to check the quality of the care we provide using clinical audit.
What information do we use to conduct clinical audit?
We may use various aspects of your information for clinical audit purposes. This will only be information specifically relevant to the subject being assessed, for example if we were auditing management of depression we would only look at information that may relate to that condition.
Will we tell you if your information is being used in clinical audit?
As your information will be kept anonymous we will not contact you directly to inform you.
You may be approached to take part in a survey on healthcare quality. In such cases, you have to right to decline and this will not affect your care in any way.
Do we ensure confidentiality of your information while conducting clinical audit?
| We are holding your records in strict confidence |
Data is collected and analysed by either a member of our multidisciplinary team or clinical audit clerk and they have a duty to keep information about you confidential. We only use anonymous information from your records. All information is kept completely secure and only used where absolutely necessary. Any final audit findings are presented as anonymous group-reports and cannot therefore be traced back to individual service user.
Is clinical audit data disseminated outside St. Patrick’s University Hospital?
Some clinical audits may require us to work with other organisations to conduct national or international projects. Then strict sharing protocols are implemented to ensure anonymity, the security and confidentiality of all information.
Clinical audits may be presented at conferences or published in medical journals because the topic and methodology may be interested to a wider audience. Data is disseminated anonymously and does not contain any information that relates to individual service user.
May the service users be actively involved in clinical audits or quality improvement projects?
Service users may be involved in clinical audit in any of the following ways:
• Suggesting the aspects of service that should be measured in a clinical audit (i.e. through the comments/complain process);
• Serving as a data source for a clinical audit (i.e. by participating in a survey);
• Helping to interpret the finding of a clinical audit and working with a clinical team to achieve improvement (i.e. by involving the Consumer Council).
If you have any queries about any aspect of clinical audit please contact our local clinical audit clerk