ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how audit can help us from an educational viewpoint and our focus will be on clinical audit activity. It looks at the benefits of engaging in clinical audit and then considers in more detail how it can be undertaken, some of the difficulties involved and how we can ensure that our efforts bear fruit. Clinical audit is the method by which health professionals look systematically and critically at their work with the purpose of enhancing the health of their patients. Clinical audit can help to identify some of our strengths and weaknesses. Audit can encourage change by increasing ownership, establishing an evidence-base and depersonalising the arguments by using informed opinion rather than impressions or vested interests to make comparisons. Reducing error through audit is an important way of preventing harm to the patient and of reducing the risk to ourselves. The chapter discusses example of clinical audit how education, patient care and proitability are linked.
