Celebrating clinical audit success at Sheffield Children’s Hospital
30 Jun 2025
Clinical audit, including national programmes like those commissioned by HQIP, plays a critical role in improving healthcare – and so saving and improving lives. By measuring the quality of care provided, it highlights what is working well and where improvements are needed. At a local level this work is vitally important, supporting Trusts and other providers to focus on improvements that will have the greatest impact on their patients. This month, we were proud to join Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust at their Clinical Audit and Service Evaluation for Quality Improvement (CASE4QI) Summit. Professor Danny Keenan, Medical Director at HQIP, reflects on a thought-provoking and inspiring day: I want to thank Dan Hawley, Hazel Collis and Jack Hiscock for inviting me to give the keynote talk at their Annual Clinical Audit conference, held in the beautiful Forth Court University building. It was wonderful meeting those who actually do the hard work of the audits and helped me to better understand their efforts and challenges. I delivered a talk concerning the benefits of benchmarking and suggested, post COVID, that this has become a ‘softer’ approach – with more emphasis on what to do about one’s position on the benchmark, rather than remaining complacent when one is in ‘middle of the pack’. We must focus more on how the high performers can help the low performers, and how everyone needs to work together to push the mean to the good side. However, for me the real event was the presentations from the floor. There were nine presentations competing for various audit accolades, having already been shortlisted as the best audits/service evaluations at the Trust. And they were all brilliant. I was particularly impressed with the evaluation from the emergency department of injuries incurred while riding e-scooters. This exceptional piece of work showed that most injuries involved head and long limb injuries. Given that these scooters can legally get up to 15mph, one can understand such injuries. Unfortunately, the message concerning wearing helmets had not got through to these children and their parents. There were other important messages too, which are leading to further collaborative work with other children’s hospitals. The children’s anaesthetists were very active and had several presentations. There was an exceptional presentation concerning the development of an enhanced recovery protocol following scoliosis surgery. This was a valuable piece of work extending over two years with great outcomes, including discharge after this major surgery being brought down to three-four days. The anaesthetists had two different presentations concerning a pre-operative obesity clinic. Both gave excellent insight into this important problem in children, which has ramifications through life. Where these differed was that there was also input from the children and their own responses to this problem. It’s very insightful work and possibly a first in England. There was a fascinating presentation concerning the increased use of immunosuppressive drugs in children. These are being used for rheumatological, dermatological, and gastrointestinal diseases more frequently. A key concern was what to do when the children had not had complete immunisations, in particular when deficient concerning vaccines using live viruses. All the presentations were insightful – and, given that these were the best of the audits and service evaluations competing, we can see there is a lot of great activity taking place in Sheffield. Many thanks again for allowing me to participate and judge the presentations. In truth, everyone on the day was a winner. I am already looking forward to another great event next year. Danny KeenanHow HQIP could help you
As a not-for-profit and trusted partner of the NHS, we understand complex healthcare challenges and take a patient-focused, evidence-informed approach to providing high quality solutions. So whether an organisation needs support with patient engagement, transformation strategy, improvement training, or value-based procurement support, we can help – with proven expertise across multiple areas of quality improvement. Contact our expert team for a free, no obligation conversation: workwithus@hqip.org.uk
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