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Unity Communications Bulletin Go-live Fortnight: Issue 9

September 27, 2019

Our Go Live fortnight continues and we are planning hard now for our first fully-live Unity weekend.  We have 619 calls yet to close from your feedback and over 2,000 complete.  Keep feeding back and speaking up. Both medication issues and powerchart continue to feature highly in your list of questions and this bulletin includes guidance on medication lists.

Using Unity the right way

today and throughout the weekend support is focussed on coaching colleagues to carry out a number of tasks in Unity correctly. We want all users of the system to become comfortable and confident in how to complete the necessary tasks in the right order.

  1. Recording of VTE assessments

VTE assessments are critical to providing safe patient care. All patients who require a VTE assessment must have this completed within six hours of the patient being admitted, in line with our Safety Plan. VTE assessments should be entered into Unity in real-time. Failure to process VTE assessments will result in a ‘hard stop’, effectively preventing a patient from progressing through to discharge home.

The numbers of VTE assessments that have been completed when triggered continues to improve and yesterday was at 81%. Clearly there is a way to go to ensure that we complete the assessments in Unity every time.

Congratulations to D5, Priory 5 and AMU2 who achieved 100% VTE assessments on Wednesday and Thursday this week.

  1. Results endorsement

It is important that all colleagues are familiar with the process for endorsing results in Unity, both for laboratory and imaging reports. Throughout the weekend, this indicator is one that we all need to focus on in order to improve the safety of the care we provide.

Between Wednesday 25 September and Thursday 26 September, endorsed results improved from 30% to 41%.

The best performing wards and departments were our neonatal unit, the critical care unit at City and EGAU who achieved 97%, 75% and 74% respectively.

  1.  Recurring issue with barcode scanning

The RXK barcode on the patient wristband (see picture) MUST be scanned when carrying out medication administration. This is the barcode next to the RXK number and not the square QR code in the centre of the wristband.

If you do not scan the barcode, this will pose a risk to patient identification.

Over the last two days the number of medications administered without scanning appropriately was just below 500.

  1. Discharging patients correctly

We continue to have a big focus on discharging across our wards. You will have seen our floor walkers and super users out and about supporting colleagues.

Over the last two days we have had around 130 discharges each day where the discharge summary has not been completed.

If you are not sure what to do regarding discharging patients correctly the following should help:

  • Start a discharge process for all patients. There is a particular emphasis on those with a planned discharge in the next 48 hours
  • Follow the correct discharge process
  • Fully complete the depart process
  • Complete all mandatory fields
  • Sign the discharge summary only once
  • Complete the discharge in CapMan

Note: ED colleagues please be aware that the ED workflows may differ for documentation of some processes in ED. Please ensure you follow the correct workflows for the FirstNet application.

The positives of Unity

Last weekend, we launched our electronic patient record, Unity.

We are still facing many challenges in our ED departments but all our sites are now live and more than three quarters of incidents raised during go-live are now closed.

We have received a variety of feedback throughout the go-live process including many positives from colleagues across the Trust.

Some of this feedback includes:

Staff nurse from D27 around drug administration rounds:

“It was difficult the first couple of days, but after a floorwalker showed me how to use the barcode scanner properly, my medicines administration round is so much quicker and easier now. I feel more confident during the round as it picked up I was going to administer the wrong dose as I misread it as 25mg instead of 50mg and only scanned the barcode once – it told me it was an underdose until I scanned it again. It’s much quicker now with the scanner than it was with a drug chart.”

Becky Bloore, matron and lead for CNPs:

“When patients are referred to me now, I can see all the relevant clinical information, wherever I am. This means I can make some quick clinical decisions and provide clinical care quickly and without having to leave where I am to go to the ward to see the notes and prescribe simple analgesia or antiemetics. This has greatly improved patient care and made my work much more efficient. Also, I have had to ring the Senior Manager on-call since we have gone live and he was able to see the situation in ED from home and understand clearer what we were discussing and this helped inform our decisions better.”

Please ensure you continue to raise any problems with access, technicalities or use of Unity to ext. 4050 if you haven’t had the help you need from the “on the ground” support teams.

How to find specific drugs in the drugs list in Unity

If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the drugs list when prescribing press the ‘search for additional items’ button, which is located next to the search box to expand the search.

Please do not use free text as this means safety decision support such as interactions and allergy checking will not work and nursing staff will require two signatures to administer.

There are a number of ‘plans’ that contain medications that must be recorded correctly to ensure patients are getting the right dosage at the right time including insulins, anticoagulants and gentamicin. For example if you start typing insulin, you will see a number of plans. You MUST use these plans as they have safety checks, tasks and alerts built into them. Please do not use the freetext field for insulins.

If you still cannot find a product, please contact pharmacy who will advise you. If it is out of hours, please consider if the request could wait until the morning before contacting the on call pharmacist.

Sixth winner of shout-out competition

Today’s shout-out winner is Dean Farrington, Matron who was nominated by charge nurse, Janine.

Nominator Janine said: “Dean our matron has gone the extra mile supporting us and encouraging us as a team to be Unity ready. This has paid off 100 per cent and has made our transition to Unity as smooth as it could be.”

Congratulations Dean and well done Janine! You will both receive Love to Shop vouchers valued at £10 each.

Don’t forget to submit a shout-out via Connect when you notice anyone going the extra mile to help their colleagues with Unity.