As Professor Howard outlines in his Foreword, audit is an essential activity for all psychiatrists and will need to be evidenced for revalidation and by trainees in their Annual Review of Competence Progression (ARCP). This book aims to help ease this process by offering tried and tested recipes for conducting audits in clinical services. All the audits in this book have been undertaken by the authors but not all had been repeated to complete the audit cycle at the time of publication. While we have endeavoured to include a range of audit topics from all the specialties of psychiatry, there are some areas that we have not been able to include, as we wanted to include only audits that had been done in ‘real life’ and were reliant on the submissions from our contributors to achieve this.

We would like to thank all those who have contributed audits to this book, to whom we are very grateful. We hope that readers of this book will benefit from their first-hand experiences