When your baby has a broken collar bone (clavicle) at birth | Right Decisions

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When your baby has a broken collar bone (clavicle) at birth

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

NHS Borders

"Information given on this site is not meant to take the place of a talk with your doctor or health worker."

Information

A fracture of the collar bone is a common birth injury. It is caused by pressure on that area during birth. Although it sounds serious, collar bone fractures usually heal very quickly, often with no need for treatment.

The collar bone connects the breast bone to the shoulder.

Bones develop so rapidly in newborn babies, these fractures heal very quickly often within 7-10 days.
Here are some things that you can do to make your baby more comfortable and promote the healing process:

To decrease your baby’s discomfort, you want to decrease movement on the injured side. You can either swaddle your baby with the elbow bent across the chest or pin your baby’s shirtsleeve in this position.
Avoid picking up your baby under the arms on the injured side. Support your baby’s head, neck and back
Avoid moving your baby’s arm up above shoulder level
When dressing your baby, dress the injured side first. Clothes that go over the head should be avoided if at all possible. Undress the injured side last.
Avoid laying your baby on the injured side
If you baby appears to be in pain, medication may be helpful. Please speak to your GP about this.
If decreased movement in the elbow, wrist, or hand persists, or if your baby continues to have pain, contact your GP.

Once your baby starts to move their arm themselves, let them move it as they feel comfortable and stop restricting arm movement through swaddling. Healing is usually excellent with no long-term problems. A bump may remain on the collar bone once the area of the break. This bump will slowly go away over time.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact your health visitor or GP

Next review date: 31/08/2025

Author(s): Murray J.

Author email(s): jamie.murray@nhs.scot.

Approved By: Clinical Governance & Quality

Reviewer name(s): Murray J.