Welcome to the Right Decision Service (RDS) newsletter for August 2024.
Following the recent RDS outages, Tactuum and the RDS team have been reviewing the learning from these incidents. We are committed to doing all we can to ensure a positive outcome by strengthening the RDS to make it fully robust and clinically resilient for the future.
We would like to invite you to a webinar on 26th September 3-4 pm on national and local contingency planning for future RDS outages. Tactuum and the RDS team will speak about our business continuity plans and the national contingency arrangements we are putting in place. This will also be a space to share local contingency plans, ideas and existing good practice. We would also like to gather your views on who we should send communications to in the event of future outages.
I have sent a meeting request for this date to all editors – please accept or decline to indicate attendance, and please forward on to relevant contacts. You can also contact Olivia.graham@nhs.scot directly to register your interest in participating.
2.National IV fluid prescribing calculator
This UK CA marked calculator is now live at https://righdecisions.scot.nhs.uk/ivfluids . It has been developed by a multiprofessional steering group of leads in IV fluids management, as part of the wider Modernising Patient Pathways Programme within the Centre for Sustainable Delivery. It aims to address a known cause of clinical error in hospital settings, and we hope it will be especially useful to the new junior doctors who started in August.
Please do spread the word about this new calculator and get in touch with any questions.
The following toolkits are now live;
We have updated and simplified this guidance within our standard operating procedures. We have clarified the guidance on how to determine whether an RDS tool is a medical device, and have provided an interactive powerpoint slideset to steer you through the process.
We have developed a guide to support editors and toolkit leads through the process of scoping, designing, delivering, quality assuring and implementing a new RDS toolkit. We hope this will help in project planning and in building shared understanding of responsibilities throughout the full development process. The guide emphasises that the project does not end with launch of the new toolkit. Implementation, communication and evaluation are ongoing activities throughout the lifetime of the toolkit.
To book a place, please contact Olivia.graham@nhs.scot, providing your name, organisation, job role, and level of experience with RDS editing (none, a little, moderate, extensive.)
7 Evaluation projects
Dr Stephen Biggart from NHS Lothian has kindly shared with us the results of a recent survey of use of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh Anaesthesia toolkit. This shows that the majority of consultants are using it weekly or monthly, mainly to access clinical protocols, with a secondary purpose being education and training purposes. They tend to find information by navigating by specialty rather than keyword searching, and had some useful recommendations for future development, such as access to quick reference guidance.
We’d really appreciate you sharing any other local evaluations of RDS in this way – it all helps to build the evidence base for impact.
If you have any questions about the content of this newsletter, please contact his.decisionsupport@nhs.scot If you would prefer not to receive future newsletters, please email Olivia.graham@nhs.scot and ask to be removed from the circulation list.
With kind regards
Right Decision Service team
Healthcare Improvement Scotland
This could include challenges about the inter-agency process, decision making and outcomes, challenges by children/young people or their parents/carers about the CPPM decisions or complaints about practitioner behaviour.
Local guidelines (below) set out the mechanisms by which dissent and dispute or complaints will be resolved and decisions approved. The agencies and services involved in child protection work have complaints procedures, which should be followed where there is a complaint about an individual practitioner. Appeals and complaints are very different and must be responded to in different ways.
The Education and Families Manager who chairs the CPPM has the responsibility to discuss in an open and transparent way conflicts of information or opinion, to ensure that they are discussed and resolved where possible. Within the context of CPPM, dissent means disagreement with the decision to register or deregister child.
If agency dissent persists, it must not be allowed to prejudice any child, young person or unborn baby’s safety and welfare, which must remain the paramount consideration. The chairperson must ensure that the precise nature of the agency dissent is recorded and participants advised that this will be considered by the relevant Education and Families Manager. The Education and Families Manager must immediately bring any agency dissent to the attention of the Senior Education and Families Manager in writing and agree a course of action. The Senior Education and Families Manager must respond to the dissenting person and agency, in writing, within 28 days, of the date of the planning meeting.
In respect of registration/deregistration, the child, young person or expectant parent can appeal. Children, young people, pregnant woman and / or family appeals against child protection registration / deregistration. The Education and Families Manager must ensure that the child, young person or expectant parent and family are aware of their right to appeal decisions about registration at the time of the child protection case conference. If, a child, young person or pregnant woman and family wishes to appeal against a particular decision, the decision to register, continue with registration, deregister or not register, they may do so by contacting the Education and Families Manager, in writing, within 5 working days. The lead social worker can assist with this if necessary. The Education and Families Manager must respond fully in writing to the person who made the appeal within 28 days.
If actions are required to ensure the child’s immediate safety, they should be prioritised and progressed without delay. The Chair of the CPPM may decide that:
When a practitioner wishes to raise an issue about the process, or disagrees with the CPPM decisions, communication and concerns should be channeled through their agency line management. There should be clearly defined local arrangements for challenging inter-agency CPPM dissent through the use of escalation procedures.
If a parent/carer wishes to challenge the decisions of the CPPM, they should follow processes defined above.
If the complaint is about a specific practitioner, they should follow the relevant agency’s complaints procedures.
Children and young people should have access to guidance that they can understand about how to challenge a decision or make a complaint from any of the practitioners with whom they have contact.
Child protection procedures