Adding visual pathways (flowcharts) | Right Decisions

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Adding visual pathways (flowcharts)

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

The built-in RDS Pathway Builder tool enables you to create pathways and flowcharts in the Right Decision Service.

Unlike placing a picture of a flowchart on your page, the Pathway Builder tool is optimised for viewing on various devices, allowing pinch and zoom for example, and allows you to add explanatory information and links.

Note

Each pathway is a page and cannot be embedded in other page types such as guidelines. You can however link to a pathway from within a guideline.

Creating a pathway

First you should consider whether your pathway(s) can stand alone as a page, or whether you need to create a section within your app/site for pathways so that you can link to the pathway from another page.

Navigate to the place in the structure where you want your pathway page to sit
Click on the three dots beside the section title and then select Page from the list of option

To create your pathway, the first thing you need to do is give it a Title and then save.
You will not be able to open the Pathway Editor until this step is completed.

starting your pathway.png

Using the pathway editor

You may find it easier if you are working from an existing pathway or have sketched out your pathway so that you know its structure and content before you start.

To open the Pathway Editor, click on the green Open Pathway Editor button that becomes visible the first time you save your pathway.

Building your pathway

The design of these is based on best practice and optimised for mobile device use.  Note there is little scope for changing how these work for this reason. 

Initially you will be presented with your start node:

Text Box

When editing a node, you will have the following options:

Text Box

Copying pathways

It is important to note that you cannot copy and paste a pathway in the same was as you would a toolkit page. To copy a pathway, follow these steps:

Open a pathway builder node, whether new or existing
There will be a button with text "Import pathway data" or similar
Clicking this button will allow a user to select an existing pathway node
Selecting another node will copy data from that pathway into the open pathway

Editing the open pathway, it will be identical to the imported pathway
The imported pathway will not be affected