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 a copy of this information in:
telephone 01896 826548
This leaflet was written in association with the "Acupuncture Association of Chartered Physiotherapists" (AACP) and the British Medical Acupuncture Society.
"Information given on this site is not meant to take the place of a talk with your doctor or health worker."
This leaflet gives you information about acupuncture before your informed consent to treatment. Please read this carefully. Ask your physiotherapist if there is anything you do not understand.
A wide range of treatments are used to improve patient symptoms. Increasingly research is finding that
acupuncture is an effective method to be given with other treatments.
Acupuncture is a form of therapy where fine needles are inserted into the body at specific points. It is one of the oldest forms of medicine originating in China. The traditional Chinese belief is that energy flows
freely when the body is in a state of good health. Acupuncture is a means of achieving this.
In Western medicine, acupuncture has been shown to cause the body to release its own pain relieving
substances. These are pain killers (endorphins) and anti-inflammatories (cortisol). They help the body to heal itself and gain pain relief.
Acupuncture is generally safe when practised by trained professionals using pre-sterilised disposable needles. Side effects are rare. To reduce these you will be asked a number of questions about your health and asked to follow instructions.
You will need to be aware of the following:
If there are any other risks particular to you, your therapist will discuss these with you
You will be given a consent form to fill in before the treatment. This will ask you some questions about your general health. These are important to allow your therapist to assess whether acupuncture is suitable for you.
Please tell your therapist if you feel unwell on the day of treatment.
This is the most common concern of patients. When inserted, the fine needles give rise to a sensation, which should be a temporary discomfort at the most. You may also have a short lived feeling of heat or tingling.
You may feel your symptoms during the treatment. If you do, please discuss these with your therapist.
If in the rare event your physiotherapist has an accident with your needles, we may need to contact you for a blood sample. If you consent to this it will only be tested if problems do develop.
Patient information leaflets