Sign off and go live

Part 3 of the RDS toolkit request process asks you to confirm compliance with HIS/RDS governance criteria. You should be ready to provide evidence of compliance if the RDS team requests this.  

Key criteria include:

1. An organisational governance body has been identified that has approved the proposed content, its release to RDS and which will oversee ongoing development of the toolkit. 
2. Any guidance within the toolkit that references medicines has been approved by the local Area Drug and Therapeutics Committee for territorial Boards or an equivalent governance group for national resources
3. Risks to patient safety have been identified and mitigated.
4. Functional testing, usability testing and user acceptance testing have been carried out
5. Content management processes are fully defined and documented across the whole content lifecycle, including approval, review and updating, and change control processes (details of requirements are provided)
6. Any toolkit has been clinically reviewed (or by managers/ social care leads for non-clinical toolkits)
7. Publication dates, review dates and responsibilities are defined for all content
8. A systematic process has been followed for sourcing evidence that underpins a toolkit
9. A systematic process and responsibilities are in place for gathering and responding to user feedback on an ongoing basis.
10. Informational content has been checked for accessibility
11. Copyright compliance has been checked
12. Privacy statement is included if required

Many of these criteria are based on the RDS standard operating procedures, which you should be using throughout the toolkit development lifecycle.

About this toolkit - documenting the quality criteria

Once the Right Decision Service team has approved your quality assurance checklist, you  should ensure that you create an "About this toolkit" section which summarises all the key points in the QA checklist. The Mental health in pregnancy toolkit provides a useful exemplar. This provides transparency around the quality assurance of your toolkit. 

And finally....

You are now ready to remove any password protection and 'in development' wording in the title of your toolkit, unhide it from the web and app, and go-live. 

Part 3 of the RDS toolkit request process 

RDS standard operating procedures

Once you have completed the RDS quality assurance checklist for an RDS toolkit, and the RDS team has approved it, please take some time to document your reflections on:

• What elements of the checklist were most challenging to complete, and why?
• What would you do differently in developing another toolkit to make it easier to ensure compliance with these quality criteria?  For example, you might take time at the start to work through the quality criteria and standard operating procedures and draw up your plans to ensure compliance at an early stage. Or you might focus on improving your approach to one particular element of the quality assurance requirements, such as user testing, or gathering and responding to user feedback.

You may have a colleague locally to discuss your experiences with and share learning. If you would like to be put in touch with another RDS toolkit manager or editor to discuss, please contact his.decisonsupport@nhs.scot.

If you would like to be put in touch with an RDS toolkit manager or editor to review the task output and gain feedback, please contact his.decisonsupport@nhs.scot.