Introducing students to clinical audit

It is more than a decade since the UK Central Council for Nursing Midwifery and Health Visiting said that engaging with clinical audit is ‘the business of every registered practitioner’, yet there appears to be little evidence that nursing has embraced the process. To address this issue, Northampton General Hospital and the University of Northampton implemented a pilot project in which two third-year adult nursing students worked on a ‘real life’ audit. Supported by the hospital’s audit department, and supervised by academic tutors with the relevant experience, the students worked on a pressure-ulcer care audit for their final year dissertation. This article describes the process undertaken by the hospital audit team and the university academic team to develop the pilot project and support the students. Based on the positive evaluations, the university has extended the project to a second phase, incorporating two new partner organisations.