Acute Sector Physiotherapists | 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

Picture of a physiotherapist with her hands resting on a woman lying down

Human impact story perspective: staff

Across NHSGGC we have approximately 450 Acute Sector Physiotherapists. The onset of COVID-19 and the introduction of social distancing necessitated a shift in the way training was delivered. New training priorities were rapidly established during the pandemic to accommodate redeployment, newly qualified practitioners, and new knowledge on COVID-19 management.

Acute Physiotherapy Practice Development facilitated delivery of 49 sessions of virtual learning presented by expert clinicians from a wide variety of clinical areas. Throughout this process considerable learning was achieved about how to deliver training virtually and best practice was determined.

After eight months of Practice Development-facilitated sessions, the staff were invited to state their requirements and ideas using a survey, email, telephone or Microsoft Teams. This established learning needs towards improving their skills for independently delivering learning and development virtually. Band 6 (B6) staff are expected to deliver most In-Service-Training, and as a team we wanted 80% of B6 Adult Acute Physiotherapy Staff to be competent in using virtual methods to deliver essential learning and development.

Actions included creating and circulating resources, training & advice specific to the needs of the Physiotherapists. An improvement group was formed with 30 members and was supported by a Microsoft Teams page for resources & peer support. We arranged three training sessions from digital experts bespoke to the stated needs, created six short videos, arranged peer support practice groups and online events.

As a result, 81% of B6 staff reported competency in delivering training via virtual means. This is an improvement of 76.5% since March 2020. The most commonly reported actions that nurtured improvement were time to practice with the systems (83%) and opportunities to deliver virtually. They also needed appropriate infrastructure, support and resources to assist with their learning. The effort by the team meant that wide-scale face-to-face and on-demand learning and development could be achieved over our large, diverse and ever-changing workforce.

Please note: photograph used was taken before COVID-19 face covering guidelines.