Guidance

A quick step by step guide to doing a continuity of care audit

Updated 30 November 2018

© Crown copyright 2018

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: psi@nationalarchives.gov.uk.

Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.

This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/continuity-of-care-for-prisoners-who-need-substance-misuse-treatment/a-quick-step-by-step-guide-to-doing-a-continuity-of-care-audit

This is a summary of the steps you should take when conducting a continuity of care audit. There are more details in the guidance section ‘How to conduct a continuity of care audit’.

  1. Commissioners and service providers (community or prison) should use the Public Health Outcome Framework (PHOF) indicator 2.16 companion report available on the ndtms.net report viewer to identify the main secure setting community providers sending and receiving transfers to the community.
  2. Commissioners and providers should make contact with these target providers to gain their support and engagement in the project – your National Drug Treatment Monitoring System regional team can support you in obtaining contact details.
  3. Once all parties’ engagement is confirmed, use the PHOF 2.16 report to agree on the appropriate time frame to audit and the analysis aims and methodology, including who will undertake the analysis.
  4. Prison treatment providers to extract data on transferred clients as outlines in the data extraction protocol.
  5. Copy the extracted data on transferred clients into the audit template. You should take care to ensure that each spreadsheet only contains clients from one local authority. If multiple community providers are involved in the project, you will need to produce one spreadsheet for each local authority.
  6. Prison treatment providers should send each participating community treatment provider the audit spreadsheet containing the clients that were transferred to them. This should be sent via secure Criminal Justice Secure Mail (CJSM) email (suggest with additional 7-zip encryption). You should take care to ensure that community providers only receive the spreadsheets of clients that were transferred to them to prevent any data breaches.
  7. Community providers should research each client on the audit spreadsheet and populate it to indicate the outcome of the referral for each client (you can use the audit questions checklist to collate the information for the spreadsheet.
  8. Once the audit spreadsheet is complete, it should be sent back to the prison using secure CJSM email (suggest using additional 7-zip encryption).
  9. Analysis to commence as agreed at step 3.
  10. Results of analysis to be reported to all stakeholders engaged in the audit.

The project team may need to hold regular meetings throughout the process to discuss progress and set and review actions.

Back to top