About the East Kent Clinical Audit Service

East Kent Partnership

The current healthcare organisations who commission EKCAS to provide their clinical audit services are:

• East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust

• Kent Community Health NHS Trust (eastern area only)

East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust acts as the host on behalf of all of the east Kent partner healthcare organisations. As a result of the hosting arrangements, all EKCAS staff are employed by East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust, and EKCAS is a member of the Directorate of Clinical Quality and Patient Safety within that Trust.

EKCAS has two audit teams serving the acute and primary care provider services.

Aims of the East Kent Clinical Audit Service (EKCAS)

The aims of the EKCAS are agreed with the partner healthcare organisations and they are:

• To support the development of care pathways and disease management programmes by co-ordinating cross sector (interface) audits.

• To develop a consistent approach in all services to ensure that clinical governance is continuous across the continuum of healthcare in east Kent.

• To develop partnerships with link organisations involved in the delivery of healthcare, where audit of the service would be helpful but is not directly managed within the audit services. This includes the Ambulance Trust, private hospitals, educational institutes, out of hours care providers.

• To report to individual organisations the outcomes of the audit service and agree with them the following years audit service aims and objectives.

EKCAS services supporting clinical audit in east Kent

EKCAS provides a full range of audit services, supporting clinical audit activity within the three partner organisations and across the interface between these organisations. An important part of our audit activity goes to supporting audit of topics covered by NICE guidance and the NHS Litigation Authority risk management standards, as well as ensuring that trusts meet the requirements for clinical audit as set out in the “Standards for Better Health”.

The range of services available from EKCAS include:

• Advice and guidance on clinical audit

• Training in clinical audit

• Project planning advice

• Project facilitation (e.g. data collection tool design, etc)

• Project task completion (e.g. data analysis, report writing, action planning, etc)

• Reporting

• Progress monitoring & action plan implementation monitoring.

Each partner healthcare organisation is currently developing individual clinical audit programmes with support from EKCAS. As part of the wider support provided by EKCAS to these respective organisations; EKCAS staff regularly attend and contribute to a large number of service based, directorate wide management groups.

Accountability

EKCAS is accountable to each of its parent healthcare organisations through their respective clinical audit groups, whose multi-professional membership is drawn from across their organisations, and is designed to be representative of the organisation itself. EKCAS is working with each organisation to develop carer & user involvement in clinical audit and this will continue as one of our objectives.

As part of its remit; EKCAS regularly contributes clinical audit evidence on behalf of our partner healthcare organisations. This supports those organisations with internal and external assessments conducted by such organisations as the Healthcare Commission, NHSLA or the local Strategic Healthcare Authority.