COVID-19 response | Right Decisions

Announcements and latest updates

Welcome to the Right Decision Service (RDS) newsletter for August 2024.

Contingency planning for RDS outages

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 26^th 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.

New toolkits

The following toolkits are now live;

Gender identity healthcare: adults and young people standards. (https://rightdecisions.scot.nhs.uk/genderidentity ) Note that this toolkit includes self-evaluation forms for each standard. A Scottish Government launch of these standards, together with the toolkit and NES educational resources, is planned for 3^rd September.
Care Inspectorate staffing method framework.
Vascular surgery pathways from the Modernising Patient Pathways Programme within the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Delivery.

Updated guidance on current and future Medical Device Regulations

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.

Guide to six stages of RDS toolkit development

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.

Training sessions for new editors (also serve as refresher sessions for existing editors) will take place on the following dates:

Thursday 5 September 1-2 pm
Wednesday 24 September 4-5 pm
Friday 27 September 12-1 pm

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

COVID-19 vaccination

Vaccinations were delivered predominantly in community mass vaccination centres, all recorded via the TURAS VMT application. To maintain the lifelong GP record, all COVID-19 vaccination data was back-populated into GP systems.

COVID-19 Community Assessment Centre (CAC)

Over 40K patients referred, appointed and assessed over 2 years of operation. Rapid establishment of 8 COVID-19 Community Assessment Centres including Gateway protocols, RMC appointing, Assessment recording via bespoke Turas App, and PCR Testing.

COVID-19 Hub

Reviewing, monitoring and adapting COVID-19 systems, processes and pathways. The COVID-19 Hub handled more than 80K referrals since March 2020. GP OOH Service continues to receive COVID-19-positive patients and patients with key COVID-19 symptoms during the out-of-hours period.

Care homes testing, email / test results

Set up and training for HSCP sites to generate PCR test requests electronically for over 200 Care and Nursing Homes, and deliver results via NHSmail / 365 and MicroStrategy reports and dashboards.

Rapid implementation of Health Records Admin Hub to support Flow Navigation Hub

To direct patients to appropriate services to reduce unnecessary pressures on Emergency Department
Redesign of urgent care pathways
The Admin Hub incorporates Phlebotomy booking as well as Staff Testing and CAC bookings
6,000 referrals are processed each month from NHS24
5,000 referrals are processed and booked for Phlebotomy per month
1,600 bookings per month are made into Community Assessment centres via the Admin Hub

Informatics and data analytics

Reporting of positive results to support HSCP and care home management of COVID-19 tests
Expanded Unscheduled Care Command Centre operational views of SATA and CAC and introduced overview of inpatient positive and pathway cases.
Introduced collated daily COVID-19 KPI reporting covering activity, occupancy, absences, vaccinations, and prevalence figures.
Cohort management and schedule processing to support COVID-19 and Flu vaccination programmes.
Remobilisation planning and activity monitoring including reporting of all reprioritised waiting lists.
Three million COVID-19 vaccinations recorded via the Vaccination Management Tool application