Quality improvement
Quality improvement is a systematic, formal approach improve outcomes across various different professions from medical healthcare to business. Within the veterinary profession, this is focused around achieving the best outcomes for our animal patients with concurrent benefits for animal owners or carers and veterinary teams.
Within our hospitals and practices, our clinical teams utilise a number of QI processes including regular clinical audit, generation of benchmarking data, hosting audit of significant events, use and creation of clinical guidelines and checklists (e.g. patient safety checklists used in theatre).
We contribute to collection of national and international audit data run by groups within the veterinary profession. Our undergraduate students have the opportunity to undertake a QI project such as performing a clinical audit or benchmarking exercise within their third year of their veterinary degree programme. Postgraduate teaching on clinical audit is also undertaken by our Veterinary Postgraduate Unit.
INCISE project
We have set up the international colic surgery audit (INCISE) This is an international QI project collecting data about horses from across the world who are undergoing colic surgery.
This website based toolkit allows data to be collected securely and anonymously enabling clinics to collect data about their own colic patients and the ability to generate instant reports about patient outcomes. For more information about the project, watch the video or contact colicr@liverpool.ac.uk.
Clinical audit postgraduate module
Our Veterinary Postgraduate Unit runs a clinical audit module as part of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) Certificate in Advanced Veterinary Practice (CertAVP).
For further details about this and other modules, visit our Veterinary Postgraduate Unit website.
RCVS Knowledge
For more information about Quality Improvement and access to various toolkits, visit the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) Knowledge website.