ABSTRACT
Clinical guidelines are systematically developed statements designed to help practitioners and patients decide on appropriate healthcare for specific clinical conditions and/or circumstances (Field & Lohr, 1992). These documents are essential to good clinical care, especially when managing less commonly-encountered conditions or emergencies. They are often developed by national agencies such as NICE, or medical colleges, and commonly adapted to fit local needs. At Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), we have over 650 clinical guidelines covering wide aspects of clinical practice. These are stored within the hospital intranet system, and are accessible only via Trust-approved desktop computers. However this is not practical during medical emergencies, when it would be inappropriate to leave the bedside of very sick patients to search for information. The guidelines menu system is also poorly designed and difficult to navigate. One consequence of this is clinical users working from memory, often missing essential steps in clinical managements (Arriaga et al., 2013). They may also access guidelines and protocols that have not been approved by the Trust, which may not have been verified to be accurate (Hasty et al., 2014), or differ from local guidance. This can potentially lead to patient harm.
Another issue that this initiative seeks to address concerns the relative high turnover of trainee medical staff during their clinical rotations. This presents a problem of how to ensure staff that are new to the organisation are able to access this type of information easily and reliably. This issue is further compounded if short-term agency and locum staff are also considered.
