Key question: effective?
Population group: All groups
These examples relate to Key Line of Enquiry E2: How are people’s care and treatment outcomes monitored and how do they compare with other similar services?
When we inspected
Practice 1
There were no systems to monitor and improve outcomes for patients. Clinical audits had not been completed. The GP told us they carried out their own audit of referrals, although it was not clear what format this took and records were not available to demonstrate the findings.
Practice 2
The practice was unable to evidence how they used the information they collected for the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF). They told us that they did not assess their performance against national screening programmes to monitor outcomes for patients.
The lead GP was unclear what their QOF result was for last year and could not locate a copy of the last QOF report.
Why this is inadequate?
There is little action here to monitor patients’ care, treatment and outcomes, and thus identify any changes in practices which would lead to improvement in standards of care for patients.