Ensuring Quality Healthcare Practice for Doctors and Medical Allied Professionals Through a Digital Interactive Audit Platform

Abstract

Internationally there are different requirements for measuring and monitoring health care practice and cross-border clinical placement. However, the quality of the clinical training settings has a significant impact on student experience and knowledge and eventually on the quality of the healthcare services. HealINT4ALL funded by the European Union aims to develop a global prepared health workforce regardless of cultural, political or educational context. Despite the great diversity due to the different needs, resources, regulations etc., there is a clear need for harmonised minimum training requirements especially for healthcare professions and from those benefiting from automatic recognition across the EU such as doctors, nurses and midwives, as reflected by the EU Directive (2013/55/EU). In offering international mobility, universities must ensure that learning environment standards are ethical and commensurate with their own quality assurance processes. For medical professions, demonstrating the quality of clinical practice internationally can be a challenging task. The project will innovatively adapt the newly established audit protocol and support tools to suit the needs of higher education for wider application in learning environments in medical-related professionals. The participatory co-creation methodology involving end-users in workshops to ensure alignment of the digital content with the learning needs of the students is essential to facilitate consistency and assure confidence for all stakeholders in the audit process and its outcomes. In order to facilitate quality assurance, consistency and raise standards of care, a digital interactive audit platform, supported by access to a central database is incrementally developed. The triangulation of the evidence obtained from the mapping exercise of the participating countries, provided the basis for the development of the first part of the digital audit platform.

Co-Creation of a Virtual Interactive Teaching Package for Auditors of Healthcare Placements – Towards Assurance of Quality of Health Care Traineeships

“…The project conducted a literature scoping review followed by interviews and focus groups across all 6 European partners of clinicians, students and educators of service needs and best practice, resulting to map standards and requirements for clinical learning environments and develop a protocol to assess the quality of placements. Next, it developed a digital interactive platform for European and national placements appraisal following user-centred design to allow the collaboration between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), and HEIs and placements [9]. In order the application of the HEALINT4ALL protocol within the digital interactive tool to be beneficial, the auditors of the healthcare placements should have the necessary competences to perform the audits utilising the HEALINT4ALL a digital interactive platform.…”