Question: Designing an Audit Tool You are a public health nurse in a small, nonprofit visiting nurse clinic. The nursing director has requested that you chair the newly established quality improvement committee because of your experience with developing audit criteria. Because a review of the patient population indicates that maternal-child visits make up the greatest percentage of home visits, the committee chose to develop a retrospective-process audit tool to monitor the quality of initial postpartum visits. The criteria specified that the clients to be included in the audit had to have been discharged with an infant from a birth center or obstetrical unit following uncomplicated vaginal delivery. The home visit would occur no later than 72 hours after the delivery.

ASSIGNMENT: Design an audit tool appropriate for this diagnosis that would be convenient to use. Specify percentages of compliance, sources of information, and number of patients to be audited. Limit your process criteria to 20 items. Try solving this yourself before reading the possible solution that appears in the Appendix.