Quality Improvement

Our Quality Improvement (QI) work aims to facilitate and strengthen delivery of comprehensive improvement and safety programs aligned with College professional standards, accreditation and education.

QI is a formal approach to the analysis of performance and the use of systematic efforts to improve it. Improvement comes from the application of knowledge and a thorough understanding of the system you are trying to improve.

Anaesthetic audit and quality improvement is embedded in what we do as clinicians. Through quality improvement projects we have achieved real change, such as reducing mortality and improving care for some of the highest risk patients, those undergoing emergency surgery for laparotomy and hip fracture.    

Take a look at our QI strategy for more details on our vision and ongoing projects

Strengths of Quality Improvement 

• Reputational benefit for the specialty. QI will ensure we continue to have high performing, robust anaesthetic services, and excellent patient care. To deliver safe and effective care with a decreasing resource, anaesthetists must adopt continuous improvement to maintain the reputation of our services.  
• QI enables the College to engage with members at the frontline to tackle the challenges they face in delivering the highest standards of care.
• QI enables the College to learn from members about major issues of quality and safety that should be addressed by the specialty.
• It enables anaesthetists to provide leadership for the national and international quality improvement agenda.
• QI principles are well-respected within the anaesthetic community.
• It promotes health and wellbeing by improving job satisfaction though embedding good practice and continuous learning.
• It has led to improved culture and ethos in departments engaged in continuous quality improvement.
• It promotes the routine collection of quality metrics allowing us to demonstrate the impact of anaesthetic QI initiatives and the value of co-operative, anaesthetic led change.
• The ability to use improvement skills to innovate, adapt and rapidly test changes ensures that anaesthetists are well equipped to work in a rapidly changing healthcare environment

Quality Improvement Compendium

The Quality Improvement Compendium, previously known as the Audit Recipe Book, has provided a popular manual of audit topics for anaesthetists.

We encourage all anaesthetists to use the methods in this book and the basic template to create their own topics or adapt topics to their own particular needs.  

Further information and the full document can be found here.

Quality Network 

The College facilitates a Quality Network to help our fellows and members share successes and lessons learned from quality improvement work, develop their QI knowledge and increase their confidence to undertake improvement projects.  

Full details of the network and how to contact your regional lead can be found here.