Supporting Rural and Remote Practitioners Through Flexible Audits
Delivering high-quality skin cancer care in rural and remote settings comes with unique challenges. Lower patient volumes, broader scopes of practice, workforce limitations, and geographic isolation can make participation in structured quality improvement activities more difficult than in metropolitan environments. Despite these challenges, ongoing audit, reflection, and continuous improvement remain essential to safe and effective patient care.
Many traditional audit frameworks assume high case volumes and fixed collection periods. In rural and remote settings, patient presentations may be less frequent, seasonal, or influenced by population movement, making rigid audit requirements difficult to meet. Recognising these realities is important to ensure audit-based professional development remains fair, practical, and relevant for all practitioners.
The SCARD Surgical Audit has been designed with flexibility to support participation across diverse practice settings. Data is collected on a per-lesion basis, allowing practitioners to record clinically relevant information whenever care is provided. While minimum specimen requirements are maintained to preserve audit integrity, the time allowed to meet these requirements is adaptable to reflect local caseloads. Practitioners enrolled in the SCARD Surgical Audit CPD Program are assessed in the context of their practice location to ensure rural and remote caseloads are not disadvantaged.
Collection periods are typically completed over around two months; however, practitioners in lower-volume settings may require additional time. Where necessary, collection periods may extend over several months without compromising audit validity. This approach ensures that meaningful participation in audit and quality improvement is not limited by geography.
Practitioners working in rural and remote communities often manage a broad range of clinical cases, with limited access to specialist services. A flexible audit allows quality improvement activities to be incorporated into everyday clinical practice, rather than adding unnecessary administrative burden. By supporting flexibility without compromising audit standards, SCARD aims to make structured quality improvement accessible to practitioners wherever they practise.