Clinical Audit

Clinical Audit

FORM² can be used for clinical audit

Pharmacists have been using FORM² to record and report prescribing errors to clinicians in the workplace.  With Trust approval, minimal patient data were collected (age, gender, brief details of presenting complaint) so that the doctors could identify the patient.  The pharmacists collected information on Tuesdays about any medicines that were missing that should have been prescribed and any errors that had been made in the prescriptions.  On Wednesdays the data were downloaded and used to populate feedback forms which were emailed to the clinicians on Thursdays and discussed at Friday morning meetings.

Users reported the benefits of using FORM² for clinical audit as follows:

  • It was easy to amend, update and publish new forms
  • It would have been impossible to deliver the feedback to the timescale described above if we had used a paper-based system
  • FORM² was the only way that this study was actually possible

“The forms were very easy to create. It was straightforward to design a form, publish it and then see it on my iPad within a few minutes. Then I could make any amendments needed and continually tweak and view the form until it was exactly the way that I wanted it.”

“The other huge advantage is that when I made amendments to the form during the piloting phase, it was really simple to unpublish the old version and publish the new one. There wasn’t the need to hunt around for old copies of data collection forms to stop them being used in error.”

Mary Tully, Reader in Pharmacy Practice, MMS and Salford Royal Foundation NHS Trust