Attitudes to audit

An exercise in audit was arranged jointly by the Local Medical Committee and the Royal College of General Practitioners in the Doncaster area. This was followed up by a questionnaire enquiring about attitudes to the audit.The proportion of doctors who did the audit was low (28 per cent overall and 7 per cent for doctors who had graduated abroad). The followup questionnaire was answered by 28 (78 per cent) of the doctors who had done the audit and by 25 (38 per cent) of those who had not. There was strong opposition to outside control of audit and some respondents even had doubts about control from within the profession.If the Doncaster findings are representative of other areas of the country, the future outlook for audit in general practice is bleak.