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Patient care is always top priorityEast Kent Clinical Audit Service Logo

James Shaw-Cotterill is Primary Care Clinical Audit Manager with East Kent Clinical Audit Service.  The East Kent Clinical Audit Service (EKCAS) is a consortium of three organisations providing clinical audit and patient experience survey support. 

EKCAS supports two provider organisations (NHS Eastern and Coastal Kent Community Services and East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust) and one commissioner organisation (NHS Eastern and Coastal Kent PCT). 

25 staff support these organisations, the majority of whom use Snap Survey Software. The surveys and audits employ a combination of modes, including paper (with scanning), online and email.

The team undertake around 45 patient experience surveys each year for Community Services.. East Kent Hospitals audit team is supporting 130 clinical audit projects, the Community Services audit team is supporting 119 clinical audit projects and the NHS Eastern and Coastal Kent PCT audit team is supporting 12 clinical audit projects. 

The audits that the team support are undertaken for a number of reasons including:

  • Documentation audits
  • Essence of care audits
  • Infection control audits
  • Identified risks
  • Local priority monitoring
  • National audits
  • To gain assurance that new guidance is being followed
  • To identify compliance with  NICE guidelines
  • To identify compliance against National Service Frameworks
  • Standards for Better Health
  • Commissioner assurance"

James goes on to explain, "Clearly the whole purpose of undertaking any quality improvement process is to implement changes where appropriate that ultimately lead to improved patient care. The two quality improvement processes that we support are clinical audit and patient experience surveys. We have made a great deal of progress during the last year in these two disciplines. We have successfully completed the first years patient experience programme and have further developed provider and commissioner clinical audit."

One of the tools that has been implemented over the last year is the action plan monitoring tool.  This tool monitors all the recommendations and actions identified from a clinical audit/survey.  It is used to produce regular reports on the implementation progress of individual actions and end of year outcomes. 

James comments, "The action plan monitoring tool has proved to be a very valuable tool in the quality improvement process to firstly monitor actions to ensure that they are implemented and secondly to demonstrate measurable outcomes achieved as a result of clinical audit and patient experience surveys". 

We asked James what he enjoys most about his job "If we ever wonder what value we add or what we have accomplished, achieved or made a difference to as a result of our work I would say that looking at the changes made and assurance given through the work we do is one of the main areas of job satisfaction."

» Visit the East Kent Clinical Audit Service website

» Find out about multi mode surveys using Snap Survey Software

July 2010