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Showing results for tags 'Care record'.
Found 29 results
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EventFree from the Patient Safety Movement offered for physicians, pharmacists, and nurses. This activity has been approved for AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™, ANCC contact hours, and ACPE contact hours. Registration
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News Article
Hancock extends emergency patient data sharing rules
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Matt Hancock has extended four national data sharing orders which allow GPs and NHS organisations to share confidential patient information, as part of the ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The data sharing instructions were initially put in place in March when the pandemic broke out in earnest, and they were due to expire at the end of September. Under the arrangement GPs, NHS providers, NHS Digital, NHS England/Improvement, local authorities and the UK Biobank can share information about patients’ treatment and medical history - if doing so would help their response to COVID-19. The data sharing instructions have now been extended until 31 March next year. According to the Department of Health and Social Care’s update which notified organisations of the extension, NHS entities can share information for reasons such as helping to support the NHS Test and Trace service, identifying further patients at risk of COVID-19, and understanding information about patient access to health and adult social care services. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 20 August 2020 -
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News ArticleGPs will now be able to access records for patients registered at other practices during the coronavirus epidemic in a major relaxation of current rules. The move will allow appointments to be shared across practices, and NHS 111 staff will also have access to records to let them book direct appointments for patients at any GP practice or specialist centre. The change in policy has been initiated by NHS Digital and NHSX to enable swift and secure sharing of patient records across primary care during the covid-19 pandemic. It means that the GP Connect1 system, currently used by some practices to share records on a voluntary basis, will be switched on at all practices until the pandemic is over. In addition, extra information including significant medical history, reason for medication, and immunisations will be added to patients’ summary care records and made available to a wider group of healthcare professionals. Usually, individuals must opt in but following the changes only people who have opted out will be excluded. Read full story Source: The BMJ, 27 April 2020
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News ArticleMedStar Health launched a new tool that automatically calculates a patient's risk of having a heart attack or stroke within 10 years. The tool enables doctors to more easily show patients their personal risk for heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular diseases over time using easy-to-read graphics. "Seeing their risk on a visual display is more powerful than me telling them their risk,” said Ankit Shah, Director, Sports and Performance Cardiology for the MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore. The tool is embedded in MedStar's Cerner electronic health record (EHR), making it easier for physicians to use it during patient visits, health system officials said. The project highlights how MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors focuses on human factor design to improve technology for patients as well as providers. Final rules from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make it easier in the future for patients to share their health data with third-party apps. Read full story Source: FierceHealthcare, 9 March 2020
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News ArticleComplaints about NHS care cannot always be investigated properly because of medical records going missing, the public services watchdog has said. Ombudsman Nick Bennett said many people were left "suspicious" and thought there was a "darker motivation". One woman whose notes went missing said she no longer trusted what doctors said and had lost faith in NHS transparency. The Welsh NHS Confederation said staff were "committed to the highest standards of care". In a report called Justice Mislaid: Lost Records and Lost Opportunities, Mr Bennett found 70% of 17 cases he looked at in Welsh NHS hospitals and care settings could not be properly investigated because of lost documents. Read full story Source: BBC News, 10 March
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Content Article
The problem with medication reconciliation
Claire Cox posted an article in Medication including labelling
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News Article
NHS e-health systems 'risk patient safety'
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Hospitals across England are using 21 separate electronic systems to record patient health care – risking patient safety, researchers suggest. A team at Imperial College say the systems cannot "talk" to each other, making cross-referencing difficult and potentially leading to "errors". Of 121 million patient interactions, there were 11 million where information from a previous visit was inaccessible. The team from London's Imperial College's Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) looked at data from 152 acute hospital trusts in England, focusing on the use of electronic medical records on the ward. Around a quarter were still using paper records. Half of trusts using electronic medical records were using one of three systems: researchers say at least these three should be able to share information. 10% were using multiple systems within the same hospital. Writing in the journal BMJ Open, the researchers say: "We have shown that millions of patients transition between different acute NHS hospitals each year. These hospitals use several different health record systems and there is minimal coordination of health record systems between the hospitals that most commonly share the care of patients." Lord Ara Darzi, lead author and co-director of the IGHI, said: "It is vital that policy-makers act with urgency to unify fragmented systems and promote better data-sharing in areas where it is needed most – or risk the safety of patients." A spokesperson for NHSX, which looks after digital services in the NHS, said: "NHSX is setting standards, so hospital and general practioner IT systems talk to each other and quickly share information, like X-ray results, to improve patient care." Read research article Read full story Souce: BBC News, 5 December 2019 -
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Royal Pharmaceutical Society: Ward round checklist example
Claire Cox posted an article in Handover
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News Article
NHS to benefit from digital 'Redbook' app
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
As part of the NHS Digital Child Health programme, Personal Child Health Records or “Redbook” will receive a digital makeover. NHS Digital has considered the limitations of the physical Redbook and decided that digitalisation is the way forward for parents to easily access important health and development information. Nurturey has been evolving its product to align with NHS' Digital Child Health programme. It aims to be an app that can make the digital Redbook vision a reality and currently in the process of completing all the necessary integrations and assurances. It is hoped that by using smart digital records, parents will be more aware of their child’s health information like weight, dental records, appointments and other developmental milestones. Tushar Srivastava, Founder and CEO of Nurturey, said: “Imagine receiving your child's immunisation alert/notification on the phone, clicking on it to book the immunisation appointment with the GP, and then being able to see all relevant immunisations details on the app itself. As a parent myself, I see the huge benefit of being able to manage my child’s health on my fingertips. We are working hard to deliver such powerful features to parents by this summer.” Read full story Source: National Health Executive, 5 February 2020 -
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This is Me - My care passport
Claire Cox posted an article in Care plans
This booklet is for patients to download and use. It includes: My basic information Things you must know about me Things that are important to me My likes and dislikes This passport can be taken into any healthcare setting. -
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Content ArticleThis blog explains the benefits of enabling people to access their health records within primary care.
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How to access your health records
Claire Cox posted an article in GP records
What will I learn? How to access your GP record How to access your summary care record How to access someone else's care record How to get your records changed -
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Patient allergies and electronic health records
Claire Cox posted an article in Allergies
Key take home messages A patient's drug allergy status should be checked and updated at all patient contacts with healthcare professionals. Recording suspected drug allergy in the patient record requires a minimum degree of detail including the reaction, the drug given, the time-frame of the reaction from initiation of the drug, and what drugs or drug groups to avoid. Both adverse drug reactions and drug allergies should be documented in the electronic patient record, separately if possible but together if not, and should not be removed from the record without consideration of and the involvement from the patient in the decision to remove it. Drug allergy status should be recorded on all written communication regarding the patient between health care professionals. -
Content ArticleMain content
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Content ArticleWe have a new app within Homerton which is featured on the hub. The Homerton University Hospital (HUH) Action Card App is an initiative that aims to bridge the gap between information/processes with clinical members of staff without the need to log into a computer, access the intranet, and finding the long black and white document which is never ending. The Action Card App has easy to read, 1-page coloured documents relating to local and national/local incident trends and Never Events. We entered the Patient Safety Learning Awards on the back of seeing the hub and finding content on there that was incredibly useful on a day to day basis. We genuinely weren't expecting to hear anything back from the Patient Safety Learning team as we are a small trust that not a lot of people know about, and we thought the standard of patient safety initiatives would be high, with many trusts miles ahead of us. I have to say, the team at Patient Safety Learning were nothing but lovely, from the moment the conversation started about the prospect of entering the awards. They all took the time for correspondence and they treated you as a person, as oppose to an entry. When we got the information that we had won the overall prize, we were gobsmacked and elated. The app team were overjoyed with the sense that our hard work had paid off and someone had taken the time to appreciate the work we have been doing at Homerton. We were asked to prepare a presentation prior to the awards, which showcased our work and to share with the attendees of the conference. The day arrived, with so much great work, inspiring talks and a general atmosphere of wanting to do more to keep our patients safe. I would like to thank everyone who heard our presentation (some may say performance) and thank everyone in the Patient Safety Learning team for their help with this process.
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Content Article
Electronic observations – how safe is it?
Anonymous posted an article in Florence in the Machine
Paper observation charts are now a thing of the past where I work. Gone are the days of charting your patients’ blood pressure and pulse in the tiniest of boxes. So small you could barely see the date and time of day at the top. Often, the chart looked as if it had been filled in by a spider with inky feet, sometimes it was sticky from medication that had been spilt on it (or sometimes worse). It would be passed from one clinician to another, a little ragged round the edges. Nurses had to remember when to do the next set of observations according to the National Early Warning Score (NEWS). As for auditing observations to ensure we were adhering to national guidance for the whole hospital… forget it. We had been use to this for years. But now we have a new chart in town… e-obs. This is going to solve all our problems. At the click of a button you have a clean, legible, fully completed observation chart. Each patient would have followed the NEWS escalation as the ‘electronic system’ would remind the nurse to complete the next set of observations at the correct time. Auditing would be a few clicks away. How many patients are scoring 5 or more? Who and where are the sickest patients? Which wards are not adhering to national policy? It is all there. This is a terminal case of ‘work as imagined’. Firstly, lets clear this up. Just because a patient is scoring a NEWS score of over 5 does not mean they are the sickest of patients. Many patients who are deteriorating, especially the younger population, score lower than 5. Patients in acute kidney injury often do not score at all but may require a trip to the intensive care unit. Do not be fooled by the NEWS score. NEWS is but a number. We must look holistically at our patients and not rely on looking at just numbers. I would like to share something that happened the other day that highlights some of the pitfalls of using an electronic observation system. I am a junior doctor on an elderly care ward. One of my patients became acutely unwell at 10pm on a Sunday evening. He couldn’t breathe, his NEWS was 9, he looked and sounded awful. I thought he was going to die. The medial emergency team came. They gave him suction, the chest physiotherapist came, they changed his antibiotics. He got a little better. His NEWS went down to 4. How did this happen? Surely, he didn’t suddenly get this unwell. He was doing well the day before. I looked at his observations. They were documented beautifully on the screen. Very clear. However, he hadn’t had his obs taken for 12 hours despite his last NEWS score was 3 (this means obs need to be taken again 4–6 hours later). Why didn’t the electronic system alert the nurses to take the obs? This is a forceable function of the system? This is why we changed to an electronic system in the first place… to prevent this type of harm from happening. So, what happened? The patient had been scoring 0 for the last few days. This means that obs can be taken every 12 hours. The patient then scored 3. His oxygen saturations had dropped. As he was ‘stable’ the nurse then changed the profile of when the next set of observations were taken. Instead of the default setting of 4–6 hourly, they had set it for 12 hourly again. This is against national guidance. Profile changes are taught to the nurses and doctors when being inducted to the e-obs system. This is important to know especially if the patient is dying, off the ward or having a blood transfusion, post op etc... This means that the patient will get their observations taken at the right time depending on what is going on. Instead, the nurse had changed the profile so that the patient received less monitoring. What was the reason for this? Was it because he had been so stable before, that they thought he didn’t require more frequent observations? Was it due to ward pressures – they didn’t have time to do that frequency of obs? What ever the reason. Its against national guidance and this ‘safe system’ has allowed us to do so. There is also another problem at play here. Take another example. A patient is receiving 12 hourly observations. They are stable. What happens when the patient may ‘look unwell’ or they complain of pain or breathlessness? You take another set of observations. The trouble is. They are not due. The system won’t let you ‘log them’. Not only is this frustrating, it also takes away intuition and assessing your patient from the bedside. We cannot be complacent. Looking at numbers on a screen is not an indicator on how well your patient is. Paperless, automated systems are brilliant. They will revolutionise healthcare, it will make care safer. We have to be mindful that these are early stages. There will be problems along the way. I just wish that there was some user testing before they rolled e-obs out. Healthcare staff will take short cuts, will do unexpected things, won't always realise these consequences. Yes, it would have cost money, it would have taken time but, if they had user tested this with real staff, perhaps this man may not have suffered?- Posted
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