End-of-Life Care Audit Toolkit

Local guidance should be sought regarding the level of ethics approval required. The aim of your audit will generally dictate whether approval is required; studies undertaken purely for quality improvement will not normally require approval, while studies undertaken for research purposes will usually require ethics approval. 

Ethical practice and standards should be maintained in all instances.

It is important that the end-of-life care audit and clinician surveys are supported and endorsed by the organisation's executive, managers, and clinical leaders.

This leadership will help to ensure that the results are used to drive improvement.

There are a number of decisions to be made in setting up the audit:

• Resources, including computing resources and staff time to enable data entry and analysis
• Scheduling, which should establish a regular process for audits; this can involve a regular audit (for example, monthly, quarterly or annually), or continuous entry of data which is then analysed regularly
• Processes, for accurate data entry (using the data dictionary and patient identifier table) and analysis
• Feedback, which should establish the process by which audit results can be fed back into organisational decision-making and quality improvement processes.

There are a number of decisions to be made in setting up the audit:

• Resources, including computing resources and staff time to enable data entry and analysis
• Scheduling, which should establish a regular process for audits; this can involve a regular audit (for example, monthly, quarterly or annually), or continuous entry of data which is then analysed regularly
• Processes, for accurate data entry (using the data dictionary and patient identifier table) and analysis
• Feedback, which should establish the process by which audit results can be fed back into organisational decision-making and quality improvement processes.

Communicating with staff, including the executive and staff at all levels, is essential to ensure they understand and support the aims of the audit and the improvements that may need to be made. Consider the use of flyers, emails, posters and presentations to support staff engagement. Resources that can be downloaded for use include:

End-of-life care audit flyer

2017

Template, survey or form

This analysis plan can be used to inform guidance on the audit tool and clinician survey design, including eligibility and inclusion criteria, data checking and cleansing, and suggested analysis methods.

End-of-life care audit toolkit analysis plan

2018

Guide, user guide or guidelines

Health service organisations may wish to use the analysis tables provided when ordering their audit tool and clinician survey data.

This supports collection of data from clinical records to provide a picture of current end-of-life processes within a hospital.

The tool can be used to conduct a regular audit (for example, monthly, quarterly or annually), or be used to input data on a continuous basis, which can then be analysed regularly.

End-of-life Care - Audit

2018

Audit, monitoring or reporting tool

This explores the perceptions of consultants, nursing staff, junior clinicians and allied health workers to end-of-life care.

The data from both the audit tool and the clinician survey can be used comparatively to evaluate whether perceptions of care differ from the level of actual care provided.

End-of-life Care Toolkit: clinician survey questions

2018

Template, survey or form

The helps to set the context of the data by establishing hospital demographics.

To ensure consistency when completing your audits it is important that you apply the definitions listed in the data dictionary to your data collection.

Patient identifiable information can be removed from the audit data by using the patient identifier table.

Request the end-of-life audit tools in Survey Monkey