What is clinical audit’s purpose: quality assurance or quality improvement?

Clinical audit has become a key activity for healthcare organisations and professionals in England. The clinical audit process is frequently described as a cycle of steps that includes making changes in practice. However, some evidence suggests that clinical audit is not effective in producing improvements in the quality of patient care. The explanation may be that clinicians and managers are seeing clinical audit as a quality assurance process, which implies making small adjustments in practice to conform to standards, rather than as a quality improvement process.