Background A previous audit highlighted that an absence of weighing patients on admission potentially limited ability to meet best practice standards for medicine management and nutritional assessment. A survey also highlighted a staff misconception that patients do not like being weighed. Clinical staff now receive training demonstrating the inaccuracy of estimating body weight and routine weighing was introduced for inpatients and daycare patients.

Aim To measure compliance to weighing daycare patients. To maintain the change in practice of weighing patients by providing regular feedback, promoting clinical ownership and responding to staff views on how to improve the process.

Method Inpatients: A monthly audit is conducted by non-registered nurses who are often the person who is tasked with weighing patients on the ward. The audit measures if the patient’s weight was recorded on their medicine chart within three days of admission.

Daycare: An audit measuring if patients were weighed within two visits and easily accessible on the patient’s electronic record was conducted by a medical student six months after routine weighing was introduced for daycare patients.

Conclusions Both audits demonstrated improvements in compliance to weighing patients. During the inpatient audit, it became apparent that some patients have a long hospice stay and need to be re-weighed a minimum of monthly. Actions from the daycare audit included editing the electronic record to include a prompt to record the patient’s weight or reason for not doing so, which are read coded. A re-audit will be conducted in three months to check maintenance of practice.