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Home > Safe & Appropriate Use of Blood > Clinical Audit > National Comparative Audit of Blood Transfusion

National Comparative Audit of Blood Transfusion

This is a programme of high-profile clinical audits that aims to look at the quality of the administration of blood to patients, and also at the practice of prescribing blood and blood components.

Audit Users´ Homepage Facility

The audit homepage can be found at www.nhsbtaudits.co.uk/ where you will see 4 login portals. If you work at an NHS hospital, you will need to login through the "Trust Login" portal, using the PULSE code of your main hospital as the password. Once you are on your homepage, you can access the homepages of individual NHS hospitals by using the appropriate PULSE code as a password. Staff at Independent hospitals and in hospitals outside England can access their homepage through the "Hospital Login" portal, using their PULSE code if they have one, or the special password we have created if not. We will be pleased to give further information about the new audit user's homepage. For assistance, please contact David Dalton on 0121 278 8216.

QuickAudit - the easy way to audit transfusion practice

QuickAudit is a series of instant audit tools developed for the audit programme by John Grant-Casey, Project Manager for the National Comparative Audit of Blood Transfusion.

Clinical Audit works most effectively if the right information is collected, analysed and quickly fed back to the healthcare professionals who have been audited. However as audits, particularly national audits, can take time to report, healthcare practitioners may move on and the impetus gained during the audit may be lost. Many transfusion practitioners have neither the time, nor expertise with software to enter data and create reports. QuickAudit provides the answer: it is an automated clinical audit reporting system.

The QuickAudit tools

Currently QuickAudit tools are available for auditing aspects of patient safety as they apply to blood transfusion. QuickAudit can be used to locally audit the wearing of wristbands, the information those wristbands contain, observations of the patient before, during and after transfusion, and transfusion-associated paperwork. As each National Comparative Audit reports in the future, we will provide QuickAudit tools if we think they will be helpful. We will also consider requests from hospitals to create specific QuickAudit tools provided you agree that we can share the tools with others. QuickAudit tools can either produce a written report using Microsoft Word 2003 or a presentation using PowerPoint 2003. Both work with later software versions.

QuickAudit tools can be used anywhere and at any time to demonstrate to managers the quality of transfusion practice and how it can be improved. You can use them to audit individual healthcare practitioners over time, small groups such as staff in a certain clinical area, or large groups such as all medical wards or an entire hospital or NHS Trust. It’s up to you. The data collected is for your use only and there is no requirement to share it, although as the use of QuickAudit becomes more common, it may be helpful to share findings with other hospitals at RTC meetings. QuickAudit can be used to audit current practice or evaluate an intervention, for example to find out whether training has made a difference.

Contact John Grant-Casey or David Dalton for more details.

The Planned Audit Programme 2012/13

Audit of the use of blood in adult cardiac surgery

We are pleased announce that, in collaboration with the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britiain and Ireland and the Association of Cardiothoracic Anaesthetists, we are conducting an audit of the use of red blood cells in adult cardiac surgical procedures, such as coronary artery bypass grafts, valve repair and valve replacement. We have invited all cardiac centres in the UK and Ireland to take part in the audit, which will use existing data from procedures performed in 2010. We expect to issue a report by the end of 2011.

Audit	Scheduled start	Scheduled report
Audit of the use of blood in adult cardiac surgery	June 2011	December 2011
2011 re-audit of Bedside Transfusion Practice	April 2011	October 2011
2011 Audit of the medical use of red cells	September 2011	April 2012
2012 Audit of blood sampling and labelling	April 2012	October 2012
2012 Audit of the use of Anti-D	September 2012	April 2013
2013 Audit of patient information and consent	April 2013	October 2013