The RCP has called for stronger educational and organisational infrastructure when promoting the benefits of NCA data to trainee doctors in its latest report, Unlocking the potential: supporting doctors to use national clinical audit to drive improvement.
The report - which has been produced to encourage greater use in quality improvement services to improve patient outcomes - also said that building capability in quality improvement is key to using this data to drive improvement.
Professor David Oliver, RCP clinical vice president, said:
This report describes a key initiative: to join up clinical audit work and improvement work and provides a template for the future. By rolling out such approaches, we could equip a large number of trainees with some of the skills that they need to be local service leaders, quality champions and change agents of the future.
Key messages
- NCA can effectively promote national improvement in patient care, but in some cases promoting the use of NCA to drive local quality improvement projects can be challenging.
- Trainees are aware that NCA is valuable in healthcare but not what that means for their own practice. Trainees get involved in NCA through data collection but there is then a disconnect. Trainees are not involved in using the collected data nor do they know how to access it.
- Critical ingredients are mentoring, time and headspace to plan and do. If this is not given attention, then any quality improvement initiative is a token effort and is set up to fail with consequent demoralisation of all staff involved.
The report was independently commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP).