Quality of care of patients with diabetes: collation of data from multi-practice audits of diabetes in primary care

Background. GPs are now playing a greater role in the care of patients with diabetes. The challenges described in the Saint Vincent Joint Task Force R eport include achievement of a reduction in long-term complications by coll ecting key clinical information and systematically organizing care of patie nts with diabetes. The number of practices conducting audit and the number of primary care audit groups conducting multi-practice audits of diabetes h ave increased since the introduction of audit in 1991. Objectives. We aimed to determine the feasibility of collating data from mu lti-practice audits of diabetes in primary care and to describe the pattern of care for diabetes patients in primary care. Methods. A confidential postal questionnaire was sent to all medical audit advisory groups that had completed a multi-practice audit of diabetic care. The main outcome measures studied were prevalence and treatment of known d iabetes and annual compliance with key process measures. Results. Data could be collated for 17 of the 25 audit groups that supplied data representing information from 495 practices with 38 288 diabetic pati ents. Seven audit groups supplied data from a population denominator compri sing 1 475 512 patients giving a prevalence of 1.46% (range 1.1-1.7%), 50.7 % (range 32.5-69.0%) were managed by general practice only, 19.1% (7.6-39.7 %) by hospital care only and 30.2% (11.0-49.5%) by shared care. Annual mean compliance for process measures showed wide variations: glycated haemoglob in or fructosamine checked for 72.5%, (range 25.3-89.3%), fundi checked for 67.5% (57.8-86.6%), urine checked for 65.8% (27.5-80.0%), blood pressure c hecked for 87.6% (76.9-96.5%), smoking checked for 71.45 (21.9-86.0%), feet checked for 67.7% (40.0-90.8%) and BMI checked for 52.5% (26.4-68.2%). Conclusion. This study shows the feasibility of collating audit data and th e potential of this approach for describing patterns of care and highlighti ng general and local deficiencies. In-formation about levels of performance in large numbers of patients can be used to set standards or norms against which individual practitioners can compare their own activity. Comparison of the health needs of local populations with national data could be used t o inform commissioning services. However, audits should employ uniform evid ence-based criteria so as to facilitate collation and allow comparison.