What is a Nursing Audit?
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.
Click here to browse and download the Digital 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:
Here is a collection of our carefully prepared nursing audit checklists you can browse and use to help reinforce healthcare best practices and identify areas for improvement.
Best Digital Nursing Audit Checklists
Nursing audit is the process of determining the quality of nursing care by reviewing clinical records made by healthcare professionals. It helps ensure consistent quality patient care and uncover areas for improvement. Use this nursing audit checklist to confirm compliance with proper nursing documentation and check patient care provided to patients (currently in admission or discharged). With this nursing audit checklist on the iAuditor mobile app, you can:
- Use scoring to measure performance.
- Quickly identify noncompliance to proactively act on opportunities to improve the quality of patient care.
- Filter information from data gathered to help with determining the overall quality of patient care.
- Secure data for future research while staying compliant with HIPAA.
Use this digital nursing report sheet to be able to collect and conveniently review patient’s medical records using one platform anytime it’s needed. Automatically organize records with iAuditor using secure cloud storage.
Use this medical audit checklist to help multiple teams conduct medical record reviews to evaluate the healthcare institution’s current patient record system.
Use this patient satisfaction survey to assess the patient’s satisfaction with care received. Use at kiosks or conduct the survey just before the patient goes home.
Healthcare Quality and Safety Checklists
