Clinical effectiveness

Dorset HealthCare is committed to ensuring that the care we provide is evidence-based, effective and founded on the principles of good practice.

Clinical effectiveness includes monitoring and improving the outcomes of patients and service users, and also involves:

• ensuring health professionals are up-to-date in their practices and properly supervised where necessary
• implementation of best practice including National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance and quality standards and implementation of care pathways
• involvement in local and national clinical audits.

The Trust has also implemented projects to capture patient reported outcomes or goals to ensure that services are working in partnership with service users/patients in working towards their own goals.

Clinical audit

Clinical audit involves measuring the quality of our care and services against agreed standards, and making improvements where necessary.

The Trust sets an annual programme of clinical audits, both national and local. Where necessary, action plans are put in place to improve compliance with standards and re-audits are carried out to measure whether improvements have occurred.