Create a building healthcare software guide for the demographics domain

17 votes

Create a non-technical guide to building software that deals with the demographics within the NHS in England.

Under consideration make-learning-easier platform platform-phase-2 Suggested by: Mick (24 Aug, '22) • Upvoted: 21 Mar • Comments: 5

Comments: 5

11 Oct, '22
Silvia
Can we have clear specifications of what the Patient banner should look like please?
11 Oct, '22
Silvia
Following the deprecation of the Common User interface, can we have guidance on how phone numbers should be captured and displayed please?
1
17 Oct, '22
Tony Heap Admin
Further information from Silvia:

The Patient banner is generally present on all applications used in the NHS that deal with Patient care.

It displays the main demographic details (especially Name, Age and Gender) of the selected patient along with an indication of the presence or any allergies (eg don’t prescribe penicillin) or alerts (eg Patient is violent, do not see alone)

The purpose of the banner is that the user can always check who the selected patient is (especially when they have initiated a task FOR that patient, and the patient details screen is no longer visible)
17 Oct, '22
Tony Heap Admin
Continued:

For example,
I selected Mr Smith and started writing a referral letter for them, when the nurse comes in asking me to quickly sign a prescription for Mr Jones. Then I go back to my screen and I may want to clear in my head WHO it is that I was writing a referral for, was it Mr Jones or Mr Smith?

It helps avoid mix-ups when doctors multi-task and it’s generally taken into account during the Clinical Safety Review of the software.

The problem with the old banner is:
1. It was designed for the pre-mobile area, where responsiveness and font-size/legibility were not considered a concern
2. The old reference has now been deprecated

This link https://digital.nhs.uk/blog/transformation-blog/2019/why-we-are-withdrawing-the-nhs-common-user-interface contains an “example” of a new patient banner, but it’s not official guidance.
17 Oct, '22
Tony Heap Admin
Continued:

The common user interface (now deprecated) was a guidance for software developers to make sure that “standard” UI elements were similar across different applications and vendors, to make things easier for the user, you can find it in the Documents section on this page:

https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/information-standards/information-standards-and-data-collections-including-extractions/publications-and-notifications/standards-and-collections/isb-1500-1508-common-user-interface.