National audit of dementia

Care received by people with dementia in general hospitals

The audit will capture information about patients at the point of their admission into a general hospital.  The audit will provide a measure of performance against standards that would also provide a baseline for future re-audit.  The unit of analysis for the audit will be the individual ward.

Aims of the audit

The audit will:

• apply clinical and organisation standards for the care of people with dementia in hospital ward settings;
• train staff locally to ascertain the quality of care interactions using an observational or other structured feedback framework;
• support local clinical and service improvement in line with the audit standards; 
• produce reports for each service, highlighting areas of achievement and areas for improvement; 
• produce a national report which will allow wards to compare their activity and indicators of quality with all other participating wards.

Organisation of the audit

The audit is being managed by the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Centre for Quality Improvement.  Data will be fed back to and initially analysed by the central project team, via an online questionnaire base system.  All information sought from patients and staff will be anonymised.

The collaborators in this project are the professional bodies for five of the main disciplines involved in providing dementia services, and one of the main voluntary sector providers of supports and services:

• the Royal College of Psychiatrists; 
• the British Geriatrics Society;
• the Royal College of Nursing;
• the Royal College of Physicians of London;
• the Royal College of General Practitioners;
• the Alzheimer’s Society.

Professor Martin Orrell, Professor of Ageing and Mental Health at University College London (UCL) and North East London Mental Health Trust (NELMHT), and Professor John Young, Head of the Academic Unit of Elderly Care & Rehabilitation at Leeds University and Consultant Geriatrician in Bradford (LU-ECRU), are acting as expert advisors to the audit.

Participation

Participation by local service providers will be achieved by ensuring that the audit programme works in two directions:

1. Bottom up to ensure that clinical staff in provider services are committed to the ongoing collection of data
2. Top down to ensure that the senior management team in each provider service supports the programme of work and is committed to support their local teams to take forward service improvements based upon the findings from the audits.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Centre for Quality Improvement

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