ABSTRACT
This chapter presents one clinician-researcher’s experience of utilising clinical data mining (CDM) methodology within a busy hospital emergency department setting, where CDM methodology enabled the researcher to bring forward new information to guide the psychosocial care of families of acutely unwell children. As the first phase of addressing the identified practice issue, the clinician-researcher sought to find care models or interventions already available within peer-reviewed literature. CDM as a methodology has several benefits, which include utilising retrospective data that are routinely collected as part of clinical practice from already existing data management systems, being non-intrusive or invasive for service users, and that, once collected, the data can be easily de-identified. The audit collected primarily quantitative information, with a small section for recording qualitative comments by the auditors. There were three auditors in total (one student-researcher and two Master of Social Work students assisting, with secondary auditing/file checking occurring every tenth file to ensure reliability).
