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As part of the work with the Joint Specialty Societies Clinical Effectiveness Forum, the College has established a new clinical audit database. Much good clinical audit is never published and remains unknown beyond the small team that carried out the work. In his recent report, Good Doctors, Safer Patients, the Chief Medical Officer highlighted the importance of clinical audit and identified the need for greater sharing good practice and experience around audit within medicine.

For a number of years, the College has developed a clinical guidelines database on its website and recently we have added the new clinical audit database. The aims of this database are:

• To facilitate the sharing of audit experience and well validated audit tools
• To encourage health professionals to think about the quality of audit in terms of collecting useful data
• To identify audits which have resulted in changes in practice
• To encourage “benchmarking” against what is being achieved in similar units

In order to populate the database, the College needs to be informed about the types of clinical audits that are taking place at a local, regional and national level. This is not information that it can search for - it needs the specialty societies to keep it apprised of any audits that they or their members are involved in. Readers are asked to consider the criteria for entry outlined below and contact Kirstyn Shaw with the details of any audits within the geriatrics (and related specialty that should be included on the database.

Criteria for Entry to the Database
• UK based
• An area of interest to the work of Physicians
• Includes more than one site
• Includes clinical audit i.e. not a survey of consultant opinion
• Clear methodology

Information Collected for the Database
• Title/Subject of the Audit
• Organisation conducting the Audit
• Specialty
• Date Audit was first conducted
• Has there been a Re-Audit
• What were the Audit Criteria or Indicators
• Does the Audit involve Continuous Data Collection
• Setting and Number of Sites in the Audit
• Was there any Demonstrable Change as a result of the Audit
• Any Web Addresses, References or Publications associated the Audit

Jonathan Potter
Director of RCP Clinical Effectiveness and Evaluation Unit