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Clinical governance can be described as the process by which high quality services are delivered. It is the 'how to' part of a broader quality improvement agenda which includes the setting and monitoring of standards at a national level. Clinical governance is a tool to help you, as individual pharmacists, your managers and your employers to recognise and celebrate good professional practice and to highlight areas where there is potential for improvement. Engaging with clinical governance will help you to maintain and improve the quality of your practice.
Clinical governance involves learning not just from what works well but also from what went wrong to prevent similar incidents happening again. For this, we need to learn from each other and to encourage a fair and open culture where we can share experiences and promote best practice for all patients.
There is no single task which is clinical governance but there is a series of processes which, when undertaken individually, build up the picture that is clinical governance. These processes include:
- audit
- clinical effectiveness
- patient and public involvement
- remedying under performance
- risk management
- staff management
- continuing professional development
- accountability
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