Health Promotion in Hospitals

The Department of Health has funded a project to provide a web-based audit tool for hospitals in England to measure the provision of health promotion to hospital patients.

Hospitals will be expected to provide data from 100 adult hospitalised patients. Medical case notes will be used to provide information on whether patients were assessed for the following risk factors: smoking, alcohol misuse, obesity, and physical inactivity; and where there was evidence of a risk factor, that some form of health promotion was delivered. Health promotion may include verbal advice, written advice, referral to a specialist, referral to a GP/practice nurse and drug treatments for smoking and alcohol misuse.

A detailed annual report which enables benchmarking across organisations and an understanding of whether differences in performance are due to differences in length of stay, age and gender of patients will be provided.

A secure, user-friendly web tool is to be used. The audit was piloted late 2008 and the main audit is due to be rolled-out in March 2009. Data collection will take place over a 3 month period (i.e. until June 2009) and the annual report published at the end of 2009.

Click here for more information.

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