Getting the Message Right & Out

As we move to the end of a glorious summer – today is a big day for National Quality Improvement & Clinical Audit Network (NQICAN) for 3 reasons – all with a common theme of getting important messages right and out there.

Firstly we have felt for a while that our name  was misleading as Clinical Audit is a Quality Improvement (QI) process so we were contributing to CA being seen as something different to QI with having QI and CA. So we agreed at our last meeting in June to change this and from today we will be known as National Quality Improvement (inc. Clinical Audit) Network (N-QI-CAN). Importantly no change to acronym but we will be adding hyphens to help pronounce it. We also have a new logo (below) which has 13 arrows depicting an improvement cycle & also represents our 13 regional networks (our 2 London networks (NLCAN & SELCAIN) have agreed to merge with Laila Gregory as chair)

Secondly – further to feedback from previous Clinical Audit Awareness Weeks (CAAW), we (N-QI-CAN) are taking a more active approach to the week this year and working in partnership alongside other organisations such as Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP), NHS Improvement (NHSI), NHS England (NHSE), Clinical Audit Support Centre (CASC), Healthcare Quality Quest (HQQ), Q community (Q) & National Audit Providers to ensure the week (19th – 23rd Nov 2018) is effective in promoting clinical audit as a quality improvement tool for improving patient care.

Part of our approach is encouraging more of our members of our clinical audit / QI networks across England to undertake activities within their organisations during CAAW. So we have produced a ePack that contains resources / links / photos / tweets of actual examples from other trusts to provide over 20 ideas of what you could do in your own organisation. A summary of the 5 overarching ideas in the ePack is provided below:

This pack is not just for CAAW – it can be used at any time of the year as it is really important for clinical audit & other QI professionals to promote our work and successes with improvements to patient care.

I would like to thank everyone who has already shared and thus helped us produce this pack – hopefully you might see yourself in the pack – in particular I’d like to thank N-QI-CAN members/regional chairs Marina Otley and Sarah Chessell.

We will be releasing further updates / resources / competitions and signposting nearer the date – so this e-pack will be updated accordingly providing a one-stop place to find everything you need.

Link to N-QI-CAN CAAW ePack

I’m looking forward to working together to make this the best CAAW yet. Remember to share your plans / events on the NQICAN forum or on twitter – use #CAAW18

Talking of twitter – this brings me to the final announcement – we have been invited to be involved in a #clinicalaudit twitter chat by the NHSE Improvement Fundamentals QI hikers course team this afternoon so join us if you can or look at our @nqican tweets. I am keen to use this opportunity to promote good quality clinical  audit and the work of our networks. 

Over the next few weeks we will share via this blog more details of our plans for this year and also celebrate the first birthday of our networking and sharing forum (NNSF) so stayed tuned…

Carl Walker, N-QI-CAN chair