G576(P) Looked after children at risk of blood-borne infections: a quality improvement audit

Abstract

groups will feed back on their progress at the monthly meetings to encourage action and momentum. Measurement of improvement We have now completed departmental audits that are up to date and shared with the team. Our monthly meeting has a full agenda promoting and sharing best practice. Effects of changes These changes have allowed the department to move to a more cohesive and coherent view of their work around quality. We have helped to standardise care, share good practice and maintain a quality service for the future. The staff wellbeing group has started a free fruit and lunchtime walking initiative. While the patient voice group have raised the profile of recoding this in clinic letters and meetings. Lessons learnt One of the greatest challenges was getting colleagues to prioritise "quality" work above their clinical case load. In a busy department it can be hard find time to implement change. The quality day provided a different environment away from clinical duties to allow people to think about what we could do better. Message for others Identifying "quality" and the evidence required to show this is the first step. Forming a central easily accessed folder containing all the information along with an index or database to assess progress is the next. Using the CQC standards as a template for our files helped us to organise our thinking in line with national standards. Engaging colleagues and encouraging personal responsibility to support ongoing improvement is also essential. Looked After Children (LAC) is a term used to describe any children under the care of local authority. Currently, 83,000 children are Looked After in the UK and the number is steadily increasing. As part of a statutory health assessment, the British Association for Adoption &Fostering (BAAF) has published in 2008 a guidance to help with the identification, assessment, testing and referral of those children at risk of blood-borne infections (BBI). G576(P)LOOKEDIn Community Paediatrics in our University teaching Hospital, specialist LAC clinics run 3 times per week. Our department trying to ensure that best care is delivered to this vulnerable population launched a quality improvement project, aiming to assess, how well and how effectively our service identifies and tests children at risk of BBI, interrogating simultaneously its cost-effectiveness. Taking into account the difficulties in organising and getting consent for investigations in the LAC population, the cost of those investigations to NHS, but, on the other hand, the implications of potentially missing a serious infectious disease, we wanted to ensure that only those children who met the criteria had a BBI screen.We assessed our service provision through an audit, basing our standards on the 2008 BAAF guidance. This was a retrospective audit from June 2013 to June 2014. In total 212 children attended the specialist LAC clinic. A risk assessment was carried out, based on information about parental health and lifestyle and the results of antenatal screening for Hepatitis B, Syp...