Audit in Occupational Health: 2

The application of Audit to Occupational Health and Medicine

• for the Individual worker: improved standard of care while respecting confidentiality of clinical data
• for the Employer: improved effectiveness and efficiency, applying specific clinical and epidemiologic parameters to quality audit
• As an adjunct to education - to improve the quality of process of professional work of occupational health practitioners
• To determine gaps in the evidence base for current practice and hence to set the agenda for further research, and audit, and hence improvement in quality.

The importance of audit has been recognised, amongst others, by the Faculty of Occupational Medicine both in the syllabus for its examinations and its support for research and development of audit.
 

There are expectations of quality and audit, when working in a commercial environment, that are applied to occupational health services as well as to other health services. Audit is an important tool to help achieve quality in a form of  'benchmarking' but cannot be seen in isolation. Thus, appropriate training of occupational health professionals is more likely to produce a high quality process of "care" than an attempt to improve the quality of the work of inadequately trained professionals through audit.
 

The concept of 'clinical governance' is now an important tenet in the National Health Service in Britain, as well as in the health care sector world wide. This has a number of elements within it, including clinical accountability, and quality - and audit plays an important part in achieving this.

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Raymond Agius © Copyright 1995-2007

NOW.... Consider carefully what criteria you would adopt in choosing topics for audit. Write them down. Only then proceed to the next page.