Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is utilising a new clinical audit platform from Meantime IT to reduce the unwarranted variation in care.
Clinical audit is a way to realise those opportunities and to find out if healthcare is being provided inline with standards and to understand where there could be improvements.
The Audit Management and Tracking (AMaT) tool from Meantime IT is designed to streamline auditing requirements in one simple, easy-to-use system reducing the previous labour intensive process.
Alison Leather, clinical audit & effectiveness manager “AMaT has reduced the time taken to carry out an audit, and increased visibility of the process. We could have junior doctors doing duplicate audits. Now with increased visibility of AMaT, junior doctors can see what audits have been done.”
The Trust said by providing an interactive and intuitive online tool for trust staff to register, manage and report on clinical audit, AMaT is giving doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals at the trust more time to care, and create action plans that deliver meaningful improvements on the NHS frontline.
Suzanne Henderson, project manager & AMaT system manager “We now know what we are doing, so if we wanted to focus on a pathway such as COPD, you can use an audit to get real insight into what is happening in that area. We can see instantly, because they are updating their audits, how many have led to an improvement or achieved their criteria. We just wouldn’t have known this before. We had around 250 audits every year using our old system and there were 467 audit and quality improvement projects registered last year.”
The department has saved over £40k by not replacing retiring staff, after taking on AMAT. The department has also increased the number of projects that they facilitate and support, due to the time released by using AMaT.
“We looked at different systems on the market,” said Alison. “There was nothing that did everything that we wanted it to do, for example ward audits and NICE compliance statements. We thought, there must be something better out there. We worked with Meantime and they have developed a solution that best meets our needs. I would wholly recommend AMaT, if anyone wanted to come and speak to me – come and see how it works in real life.”
Now, over 2,700 staff at the trust have access to AMaT, out of the 7,000 employed. Alongside increasing the transparency and visibility of activity, it is making audit simple by guiding staff through the audit process.
