Although the need to set standards for and measure the quality of nursing care is now an accepted feature of nursing management and practice, many clinical nurses know little about what is involved or, if they do know about it, tend to regard quality assurance as something that managers impose upon them. This has been written, therefore, specifically for clinical nurses to describe the idea of setting standards and to explore a number of methods for measuring quality. It argues and explains that quality assurance in nursing is a form of peer review in which clinical nurses can use developed tools to review each other's work and thereby bring about change and improvement in their practice to the benefit of the patient, who receives better and more effective care, and to their own professionalism and skill. All the contributors to this book have extensive experience of attempting to measure quality, and a genuine desire to help clinical nurses to monitor and improve their standards. They hope that clinical nurses will themselves become more interested and involved in developing quality assurance programmes and that the current trend in setting up such programmes will lead not only to the better measurement of care but to an improvement in the quality of care giving.