A nursing audit is the process of evaluating the quality of nursing care through the review of clinical records made by healthcare professionals. It helps healthcare institutions ensure that patients consistently receive quality patient care and allows nurse managers to determine healthcare improvement opportunities.
What is a Nursing Audit Checklist?
A nursing audit checklist is a tool used by a head nurse or manager when conducting a nursing audit. It aids nursing heads in determining if patient care is aligned with the healthcare institution’s standards and in reviewing clinical records that can help indicate gaps and areas for improvement in patient care.
This article briefly discusses (1) the two nursing audit methods; (2) the steps for conducting a nursing audit; (3) a digital nursing audit tool to help nursing heads conduct nursing audits; and (4) free nursing audit checklists.
Two Nursing Audit Methods
- Concurrent Nursing Audit
This nursing audit method is conducted while the patient is currently undergoing treatment at the healthcare facility. It involves staff interview and patient assessment in addition to the review of the patient’s records.
- Retrospective Nursing Audit
This type of nursing audit is conducted after the discharge of the patient from the healthcare facility wherein the auditor determines the quality of patient care based on clinical records.
5 Steps for Conducting a Nursing Audit
- Create an audit team composed of senior nurses and other members who will be impartial auditors.
- Get the buy-in of healthcare staff. Help them understand the goal of the audit and the benefit to the patients, staff, and the healthcare institution.
- Determine the type of nursing audit method and proceed with the nursing audit using technology that can help measure the nursing audit result and analyze the information gathered.
- Review and analyze the data gathered to determine if the patient care being provided is at par with the healthcare institution’s standards.
- Promote best practices and maintain quality patient care by conducting internal audits and address gaps found.
Nursing Audit Tool
Paper-based nursing audits can be costly to conduct and time-consuming to review and analyze. Time spent on manually going through all the individual audit results and making sense of all the data gathered can be better spent working on gaps found and further improve the quality of patient care. iAuditor, the world’s most powerful mobile auditing app, can help healthcare institutions save time and effort in conducting nursing audits and better promote quality patient care by helping you do the following:
- Create mobile-ready nursing audit checklists.
- Empower teams to conduct efficient nursing audit procedures and analysis using a smartphone or tablet.
- Save time with a mobile app that generates comprehensive reports as you finish an audit.
- Automatically save all reports in secure cloud storage. Preview a sample web and PDF report.
- Use for free with small teams. Unlimited reports and storage for premium accounts.
