New benchmarking boxset released

The third series of RCVS Knowledge’s free educational QI Boxset has launched, covering benchmarking and how it can be used to help improve clinical outcomes and quality of care. The QI Boxset is a CPD multimedia toolbox, offering bite-sized content designed with the busy team in mind, for on-the-go and at home learning at the user’s own time and pace.

Benchmarking is a Quality Improvement (QI) method that allows teams or individuals to compare their clinical audit results against other audit results (the benchmark). Through a repetitive cycle of ‘measure, compare, change’, benchmarking helps to explore trends over time and to achieve improvements in quality of care.

RCVS Knowledge hosts vetAUDIT, a hub of free-to-use national audit and benchmarking platforms, where teams or individuals can take part to share data anonymously, to contribute to establishing an evidence-base for profession-wide improvements. The benchmarking boxset features discussions with the Clinical Leads and Project Managers of these platforms, including RCVS Knowledge’s Canine Cruciate Registry and National Audit for Small Animal Neutering and other national audits such as INCISE - the International Colic Surgery Audit.

Previous series of QI Boxset have covered ‘Establishing a Quality Improvement structure in practice’ and ‘Clinical Audit’. According to research commissioned by RCVS Knowledge and conducted by RAND Europe, a lack of time and know-how prevents veterinary professionals from engaging with QI. The QI Boxset aims to tackle this by providing easily accessible, quick, and informative content that is specifically targeted at busy veterinary teams in practice.

Pam Mosedale, RCVS Knowledge’s QI Clinical Lead, said, “The latest series of the QI Boxset is an excellent addition to RCVS Knowledge’s ever-growing suite of Quality Improvement resources, all produced with the busy practice team in mind. Benchmarking is a natural progression from clinical audit and is an important way for the veterinary profession to measure their progress and contribute to a national picture.”

The materials are entirely free to access through RCVS Knowledge’s Learn platform, through a login. Once created, the login allows access to all other RCVS Knowledge courses as well, covering a plethora of different topics relevant to current veterinary practice.