Once the analysis is complete, you will need to think about how you incorporate the key messages from the analysis in your future practice. Document them to help audit design in the future, and share them with colleagues. Inevitably, your audit will throw up gaps. So you will need to plan how you take your key recommendations forward? You might:

• Create an action plan for the pharmacy which includes your recommendations. Make sure the action plan includes a realistic time frame for completion
• Share your recommendations with other colleagues, including at the GP surgery.

If there were problems with the audit format that you didn’t expect, think about what you could have done differently to minimise the risk of them happening again. You might have allocated insufficient time, or the objectives might have been unclear. Were your team sufficiently clear as to their role? No audit is perfect, but it is important to recognise the limitations of your actions and refine them as you go along.

Finally set a date for a re-audit, to check that your service changes/improvements have been adopted across your team and that the changes are being consistently applied.

Further reading

• Royal Pharmaceutical Society website (Members’ section) Contains suggested standards, questions to ask of your services to focus your audit topic, downloadable data collection forms to use during your audit period, prompts for identifying shortcomings and plans for further improvement
• National Institute for Clinical Excellence, Principles for best practice in clinical audit (2002)
• Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership, Ethics and clinical audit and quality improvement (QI) — a guide for NHS organisations. 2010.