Significant Event Audit – also called Significant Event Review or Analysis – is an increasingly routine part of general practice. It is a technique to reflect on and learn from individual cases to improve quality of care overall.
Significant event audits should form part of your individual and practice based learning and quality improvement.
Whether clinical, administrative or organisational, the significant event analysis process should enable the practice to answer the following questions:
- What happened and why?
- How could things have been different
- What can we learn from what happened?
- What needs to change?
A further worthwhile question is:
- What was the impact on those involved (patient, carer, family, GP, practice)?
SEA team discussions should be a routine part of your practices quality improvement and clinical governance and is an opportunity for the team to:
- discuss each stage in detail
- identify any learning needs
- identify actions to be taken and changes to be made and agree how these will be processed.
