A day in the life of… a clinical effectiveness co-ordinator

ORIGINALLY beginning her healthcare career within the Tees Community Dental Service, Lisa Pickering made the jump into a new career in clinical effectiveness.

Lisa, originally from Middlesbrough and now living in Stockton, became a clinical effectiveness co-ordinator after discovering an interest in data analysis and drilling down into audits to be able to improve patient outcomes.

As we celebrate clinical audit awareness week this June, we sat down with Lisa to discuss what her job entails.

What led you to a career in clinical effectiveness?

I used to work within the Tees Community Dental Service and it’s when I was working there that I would sometimes get involved with some of the audits that would take place for dental. It was always my favourite part of the job – I liked getting involved in the data analysis side of things and understanding what the numbers meant.

I always liked seeing what could come out of the outcomes and results. It was when I was looking at a job advertised within the clinical effectiveness team and I read through the requirements that I thought ‘this is my favourite part of the job I currently do – but I’d be able to do it all the time.’

So I applied and was successful. It was the best decision for me as I’ve found a job I really love to do.

What does your role involve? What does a clinical effectiveness co-ordinator do?

My role is really involved – it’s supporting clinical colleagues with the audit process, but then understanding the data and offering advice on what to change to improve patient care standards.

People from across the hospital will decide upon a specific topic that needs auditing, register their project and a co-ordinator will be assigned to them. At this point, the co-ordinator will start by meeting with the auditors to identify what sort of questions need to be asked and will help to develop an audit form.

We will then identify suitable patients to take part – checking against the national data opt out system to ensure patients have given permission to be involved. We’ll also check the relevant coding data for each of these patients as well – to ensure they meet the inclusion criteria.

Once we’ve worked out all the initial details, the service involved can start to collect the audit data. We will link in with the team periodically to ensure everything is on track and once we have all the data we’ll complete an analysis and generate a report or presentation.

From there we can help to create action or improvement plans.

We can go back to a team anywhere between six months to three years after the initial audit to ensure things are heading in the right direction and the changes are having the desired impact.

I say all the time to colleagues that it’s not just a tick box exercise and auditing can have a huge impact on patient care for the better.

Lisa Pickering, Clinical effectiveness co-ordinator

What does a typical day look like for you?

Usually, I’ll start the day by checking through emails – I’ll see if anything urgent has come in and if any of the department’s or team’s auditing need any support. I’ll then check to see if there are any new projects that need help being set up.

There may then be some continuous audit reports I need to complete – some need to be run every few weeks. For example our risky behaviours audit, which is looking at patients who may smoke or drink alcohol. That report checks whether patients are being offered the right support and we have to submit data each quarter.

I’m currently juggling 47 different audits – this includes short and long-term audits both internal and national.

But I like that everyday can be quite varied. Once I’ve gone through my emails I will check through my audit list to see what’s progressing and where there may be sticking points – then checking in with people to ensure things are on track. Obviously, if I have any finished data sets, I will then run a report and look at data analysis.

How do you support clinical teams?

I don’t think people realise that we can do an awful lot to support them. From designing the audit form for the data collection, to finding the patients. If patient notes are required, we’ll even request the notes if they haven’t already been scanned and added to our digital database. 

Once data collection is done we like to do all the analysis, will draft the presentation and any reports for them. We have set templates we have to use, so sometimes if people see the form they may feel overwhelmed; but we’re here to support with that.

How important is your role in improving patient care?

I say all the time to colleagues that it’s not just a tick box exercise and auditing can have a huge impact on patient care for the better.

Until you sit back and look at the data, it’s difficult to know if you are doing all you can for your patients and making sure their healthcare journey with us is the best it can be.

You need to understand where you are performing well and where you are performing poorly to ensure you’re making an effective action plan to implement the right changes for patients and staff.

What do you love about being able to work within auditing and the clinical effectiveness unit?

Drilling down into the data is my favourite part of the job – really understanding what the results are telling us and where we can be making improvements.

I get massive satisfaction out of seeing the process all the way though – especially when you’ve run that analysis and you can see that the changes you’re implementing are having an impact.