Raising the Standards: RCoA Quality Improvement Compendium
Anaesthesia has a long tradition of improving clinical safety and outcomes by continuous critical examination of our practice. However, changing the increasingly complex clinical systems in which we work and making those changes last is a very difficult task. We need to combine our professional knowledge of what is best evidence in conjunction with knowledge of how to implement improvements in order to deliver consistent care for the patients we treat.
The Quality Improvement Compendium, previously known as the Audit Recipe Book, provides a manual of quality improvement (QI) and audit tools for anaesthetists.
This latest version aims to:
- provide comprehensive recipes for QI and audit in all sub-specialties of anaesthesia
- further promote the QI methodology and provide examples of real life change
- align with GPAS chapters in order to deliver safe and up-to-date anaesthesia, and facilitate entry into the ACSA process.
We encourage clinicians to consider the domains of quality: safe, effective, personal, timely, efficient and equitable care and to choose a balance of audits for assessing the quality of care using structure, process and outcome measures. These audits should sit within a departmental programme or personal portfolio that reflect all the different components of patient care, and stimulate improvement work when standards are not being met.
Anaesthetists should use the methods in this book and the basic template to create their own topics or adapt topics to their own particular needs.
For more information about the Compendium please contact qualityimprovement@rcoa.ac.uk
