Junior doctors’ views on clinical audit – has anything changed?

Abstract

A postal questionnaire survey of junior doctors’ views was conducted in a large acute hospital in the south‐east of England, amongst 146 junior medical staff recorded as being employed by the Trust across 21 specialities. It profiled their level of participation in audit and the quality of current audit programmes within their specialities and assessed their knowledge and understanding of clinical governance. Our findings suggest: a high level of involvement in activities labelled audit, but that these activities did not necessarily conform to robust audit methodologies; that junior doctors’ professional attitudes towards clinical audit are influenced by negative experience of undertaking audit within their specialities; and that there was a variety of understanding about the principles and meaning of clinical governance. It concluded that the conditions for coherent strategy aimed at promoting effective audit programmes which could support the use of clinical audit as a tool for continuous professional development are not yet in place across the Trust.