Background
“National guideline for assessment, treatment and social rehabilitation of persons with concurrent substance use disorders and mental disorders”, launched March 2012, is aimed at a wide range of health services. It holds a separate chapter on implementation.
The National Centre for Dual Diagnosis was commissioned by the Norwegian Directorate of Health to develop a plan for implementation of the Guideline. It contains tools to strengthen management, clinicians and consumers. A clinical audit tool was made to measure research-practice-gap. The clinical audit is the start-point of the implementation-plan, followed by an action schema. The implementation-process is as follows:
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Identify today’s practice assessed against recommendations in the guideline, doing a clinical audit
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Identify areas of improvement based on the clinical audit
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a)
choose a goal for improvement
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b)
select initiatives based on goals
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c)
allocate responsibility
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d)
describe progress
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a)
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Implementation phase
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Evaluate by a new clinical audit and summarize experiences
This project aims to understand the process of using clinical audit as a basis for making choices aimed at clinical improvement in district psychiatric clinics. The objectives of the study are to describe and explore the implementation-process from the use of clinical audit to change in practice.