The national prostate cancer audit - introducing a new generation of cancer audit

摘要

Health service providers and healthcare professionals are expected to assure the quality of their services and safeguard high standards of care. Successive UK governments have claimed that it is their ambition to provide a health service that achieves 'world-class healthcare outcomes' [1]. The current government has translated this into three priorities for the National Health Service (NHS): (a) empower local clinicians to deliver better outcomes, (b) provide information to patients that will help them to make choices and (c) create greater accountability to all those who use the NHS [2]. Although there is ongoing political debate about how we can create an 'NHS which achieves results that are amongst the best in the world', it is evident that national clinical audits have an important role to play [3].