Trust-wide Unity implementation update – Issue 4 – Top Tips
September 22, 2019
All inpatient services in community facilities and hospitals are now live. We start outpatient go live at 6am on Monday. Thank you for your help to make the start of go live fortnight a success.
Top Five Tips
A few common issues have been picked up so far. Please take note of the following top tips:
- Don’t forget to save and sign your records
Sign and save your entries in Unity to ensure your colleagues can see your notes. Notes and additions to patient records in Unity must be signed and saved on the system for them to become visible against patient records. If you fail to save and sign before you tap out you run the risk of losing data. Today we have 3096 unsigned document entries which cannot be seen by other colleagues. Congratulations to M2, D7, Sandwell Critical Care and P5 for having less than 10 unsigned documents in a whole day.
- Completing VTE assessments in Unity
Currently we have 17 patients with missing 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.
- Administering medication: Ensure you scan the patient wristband
Today, at City Hospital, which went live yesterday, 161 medications have been administered without scanning the barcode on the patient’s wristband. Our best performers are City ED and D28 with just one such error. Colleagues are reminded that when carrying out medication administration, patient wristbands must be scanned. This is the long barcode next to the RXK number and not the square QR code in the centre of the wristband. This is different to the workflow you may have followed in the play domain.
Bypassing wristband barcode scanning poses a risk to positive patient identification.
- Results endorsement
It is important that all colleagues are familiar with the process for endorsing results in Unity, both for laboratory and imaging reports. Congratulations to City AMU1 who have endorsed correctly 25% of issued results which is the best current performance in the Trust. During next week this indicator is one that we all need to focus on in order to improve the safety of the care we provide.
The following QRGs on Connect can be referred to for help:
- MC03 – Endorsing results in message centre
- RT07 – Reviewing results
- RT08 – Viewing and forwarding results
- RT10 – Endorsing results
Results for tests such as radiology and pathology returned after 16 September are logged within Unity. However, if results for tests were returned before 16 September, you will find these in CDA/CSS.
- Documenting samples when collecting bloods in Unity
Remember when you are collecting bloods you must first print the label then take the blood sample and finally, mark the sample as collected within Unity. If you do not do this it is not possible to endorse the result when it is returned to the hospital from the laboratory. Over half of yesterday’s samples were collected with this omission.
For more information, please follow the attached QRG: