Results released today, from 580 services who took part in the biannual UK Parkinson’s Audit, show positive trends in some practice areas but  challenges still to be tackled across many topics and all professions.

The 2019 audit captured care provided to 10,335 people with Parkinson’s during the five month data collection period in 2019.

Views of 8,247 people with Parkinson’s and their family and friends were also collected via Patient Reported Experience Measure (PREM) questionnaires. Positively, 90.4% of PREM respondents rated the quality of service they receive as excellent or good.

More therapy teams than ever took part in the 2019 Audit, with a 61% increase in submissions from Physiotherapy teams alone, giving a clearer picture of improvements made and challenges faced by therapy services.

Amongst improvements in many areas, the audit identified focus areas for change across all services. These were specialised multidisciplinary working, standardised practices, communication and information sharing, medicines management and supporting the workforce.

Each participating service will now receive a report of their audit results, alongside the UK wide results being available.

Participating teams will be supported to develop service improvement plans informed by their results.

In addition, this year a collaborative, multi-centred approach to service improvement on priority topics will be launched and driven through the UK Parkinson's Excellence Network. This will see services being supported to use specific service improvement tools and able to benefit from targeted funding to support further data collection and service change around specific priority topics.

Details of support and funding around service improvement priority topics will be announced in coming months on the UK Parkinson's Audit webpage and via the Excellence Network newsletter.

The full Audit reports, including breakdowns of results by profession and the full PREM results are now available.