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
For the purposes of these procedures, the protection of children and young people including unborn babies, children and young people under the age of 18 yrs.
The independent legal status of a child commences at birth. In any action to safeguard and protect an unborn child, the needs and rights of the mother must be taken in to account.
The needs and rights of ALL siblings should be considered in any process that has a focus on a single child.
A ‘parent’ is the genetic or adoptive mother or father of the child. Parental rights are necessary to allow a parent to fulfil their responsibilities, which include looking after their child’s health, development and welfare, providing guidance to their child, maintaining regular contact with their child if they do not live with them, and acting as their child’s legal representative. To fulfil these responsibilities, parental rights include the right to have their child live with them and to decide how their child is brought up. Parents continue to hold parental rights for a child up until 16 yrs unless and until these are removed. If this happens, it must be clear who does hold parental rights and responsibilities.
A ‘carer’ is someone other than a parent who is looking after a child. A carer may be a ‘relevant person’ within the children’s hearing system.
A ‘kinship carer’ is a carer for a child looked after by the local authority, where the child is placed with the kinship carer in accordance with Regulation 10 of the Looked After Children (Scotland) Regulations 2009 (‘the 2009 Regulations’).
Foster carer means a person approved by a local authority as a suitable carer for the child.
Private fostering refers to children placed by private arrangement with persons who are not close relatives. ‘Close relative’ in this context means mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, grandparent, of full blood or half blood or by marriage.
Child protection procedures