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
Medication must be given as close as is practical to the specified administration time.
Patients in mental health settings often refuse doses or may be off the ward.
This guidance is intended to support nurses to administer medication in such circumstances.
The following medications should always be given within 2 hours of the prescribed time (not an exhaustive list)
Every patient/clinical situation is different. Consider the risk to patient of delayed/missed doses e.g. treatment failure, withdrawal effects etc. Contact medical/pharmacy staff for advice about delayed or missed medications.
The full guidance can be found here.
References
If a medication is marked as non-administered in HEPMA you cannot go back and administer at a later time.
If a patient refuses a dose of medication and you intend to offer at a later point, do not chart as non-administered in HEPMA. The Patient Notes function can used to record refused doses, with information noted for other staff to use if needed - examples of how the Notes can be used can be found in the full guidance.
Options for future offered doses are as follows:
If a second offer of medication is refused, mark as non-administered at this point; but if patient decides later, they do wish to take the dose it will need to be re-prescribed as a STAT dose.
To manage the recording of refusal information you can use the Order Notes function. Add an Order Note titled ‘DRUG NAME REFUSED MEDICATION’ when needed linked to the specific medication. Use the same order note to record all dose refusals and related information. As any amendments to the notes then are marked with the last users’ name, each addition should have the nurse’s name added to easily refer to if needed, rather than having to scan the previous versions to see who added the earlier comments.
MyPsych App