“I have recently discovered i have a very high cholesterol level (around 7) from my first well man test on the NHS (for 40+ – get one if you haven’t already). I’ve now got to change my diet and possibly take statins so after 40 years of excellent health & eating what I wanted – I am now a patient.”
This is an introductory blog & my opening confession is an example of what this blog is about. Sharing a tip about something that has helped (the well man test), encouraging proactive / preventative medicine (early detection), change management (diet/statins) and improving patient care / outcomes – that’s where our network comes in. If you don’t know who we (N-QI-CAN) are please check out our website &/or our annual report – in summary we are a network of quality improvement professionals working across England.
I am the national chair (& a clinical audit manager in the day) & during my first 12 months in the role – there has been times when events have occurred and I needed more than 180 characters of a tweet to respond. Don’t get me wrong I think twitter is excellent but there have a few times when I know my tweets have been misinterpreted due to the lack of words allowed. Yes I have sent out emails / spoken to leads but in a changing nhs & an age of transparency – it is important that all forms of communication are consider and the most appropriate used – especially if we need to communicate to those outside our network (email groups).
So I have set this blog up as part of our objectives for 2017 to aid communication & sharing across our networks.
I am writing this intro & I have further blogs planned soon (pitfalls of analysing data using samples, explaining why clinical audit is many things for different people etc) but I envisage and will encourage others from our networks to write on here. Our mersey clinical audit network chair Michael Spry wrote a successful & insightful blog on the HQIP pages during clinical audit awareness week in 2015 about life as a audit manager – & this is the type of sharing and insight that I will be encouraging.
Anyway lets hope this posts ok and please say hi on the comments board below – feel free to leave ideas that you would like us to write/blog about or advise about how I can control my high cholesterol / which statins are best 😉
Carl Walker – National Quality Improvement & Clinical Audit Network Chair
