We are highlighting the newly renamed Clinical Effectiveness Committee at Trinity this week as part of Clinical Audit Awareness Week, a national campaign to celebrate the role of clinical audit in improving patient care and services.

Clinical Audit Awareness Week (23-27 November) is an annual national campaign to promote and celebrate the benefits and impact of clinical audit and quality improvement work in health care organisations including hospitals, GP practices and hospices. Trinity's Clinical Effectiveness Committee is responsible for clinical audit throughout the hospice. 

Clinical audit is a way to find out if health services are meeting local and national standards and targets. It lets care providers and patients know where their services are doing well, and where there could be improvements.

Martin Powell, Director of Patient Services at Trinity said: “By making reliable data available, clinical audits help to improve the care our patients receive. They provide the evidence to show when we’re getting it right and help us to identify areas where we need to focus our improvement efforts”. 

Jane Ingham, chief executive of Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership, said: “Many of us working in the health and care sector have observed that there has never before been a period so dependent on the quick and accurate collection and analysis of data, with public awareness of the value and impact of this work at an unprecedented high.

On the one hand, some routine audit work has paused to allow organisations to focus their efforts on responding to Covid-19 while on the other hand, we’ve seen remarkable responses and adaptions to make sure the management of patients and the service recovery from the pandemic is supported. Throughout the UK, at national and local level, there’s been a need to learn and adapt swiftly and the clinical audit community has played no small part in this evidence-based improvement process”.