Medical audit quality of note-keeping

Extract

Recently there has been an increasing awareness of the need for medical audit. Medical audit in the health service is not a new thing across the Atlantic. Many centres accept it as a normal part of health management. The findings of audit are made known to the individuals who have been audited with the aim that this would produce future improvement. Hence it is an effective way of increasing efficiency and highlighting inefficient and costly procedures. There is debate as to who should be doing the auditing. General practitioners have been suggested as being in the ideal position to be able to audit specialist services such as psychiatric services (Ferguson, 1990). GPs can be approached by questionnaire to gain their views as to the level of satisfaction on things such as communication, availability and usefulness of referral to a local specialist service (Markantonakis & Mathai, 1990).