Gathering information needs | 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

Tap each title to expand. Work through each section in numerical order

1. Checklist

This checklist provides questions to help you to select the right resources to meet the person’s needs.

Not all questions will be appropriate to every situation. Use your judgement to pick and choose items from this list as appropriate.

Download this checklist to keep

	What issues are you currently facing? What is your current situation? Is there a specific issue you'd like to focus on?
	How are you currently feeling?
	What would you like to get out of the upcoming Words for Wellbeing session?
	What is your reading preference? Fiction / Graphic Novel / Short Story / Poetry / Biography / other nonfiction / Other ? Are you willing to try a new type of reading? (For example, if they don't commonly read poetry, would they give it a try?
	How much time can you devote to reading?
	What are your favourite books / authors?
	What are your preferred reading mediums? Kindle / Audio / Printed book?
	Do you have any special requirements for reading and participating in a session - e.g. visual, hearing, access?
	Is there anything else you want to share in advance of the session?

2. Other things to consider

Other issues to consider in the selection process include:

Age of the person
If they are from an ethnic minority background, whether culture-specific reading material would be appropriate.
Literacy levels. For people with low literacy, options to consider include graphic novels, audiobooks, reading a poem or story extract aloud at the start of a session, or personal storytelling (see later in this topic.)
Other factors which may influence choice of reading material – e.g. learning or physical disability, homelessness, socioeconomic circumstances.
While reading material appropriate to a person’s background and characteristics can be helpful in some situations, it is important not to assume that only such resources can be beneficial. Sometimes, reading about quite different characters and situations where the person can see parallels with their own needs will help them to reframe and find new insights.

3. Check your knowledge

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