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Listen
Draft Guide to the Production and Provision of Information about Health and Healthcare Interventions
Section 2 - What makes for good quality information provision?
NHS Quality Improvement Scotland monitors the provision of information to patients and carers through the Generic Clinical Governance Standards and regularly reviews the performance of NHS Boards against these standards.
Information provision
Healthcare professionals can make a significant positive difference to people's experiences of illnesses and of health services by offering good quality, relevant information in a caring way at an appropriate time.
Policies and systems need to be locally appropriate, but should cover or help to achieve the following:
| The development and maintenance of clear, written statements for each care pathway that describe which information materials should be offered (as a minimum), to whom and when. |
| An understanding among staff about why good information provision is an important part of good quality healthcare. |
| Clarity among staff about who is responsible for offering which information materials to whom and when. |
| Availability of the required information materials. |
| The easy incorporation of information provision into routine clinical practices. |
| A routine means of checking that people have received, or been offered, the appropriate materials and correcting the situation quickly if they have not. |
| An easy way for staff to routinely record details of the information materials they have provided in patients' notes. |
| Periodic reviews to check that all materials are still up-to-date.
(A system for reviewing materials is likely to be based around a well-maintained register that includes details of the production dates, version numbers, authors/producers, suppliers and proposed review dates.) |
Policies and systems on the provision of health information should be based on careful assessments of information need and the identification of good quality information materials.
The following steps should help you to decide which information materials should be offered to whom and when:
| Identify the points at which people are likely to have particular information needs. |
| Consider which materials are required to support verbal information offered by healthcare staff during one-to-one interactions. |
| Identify any existing materials that might meet those needs. |
| Appraise the information materials and decide on their appropriateness. |
| If no suitable materials are available to meet an identified need, check to see whether any are in production... |
| ...If not, consider developing new materials and/or liaising with established information producers to do so. |
Managing your information
Providing inadequate, inaccurate, out-of-date or insensitive information may have adverse consequences for patients and could result in negligence claims against information producers and providers.
Healthcare providers can use well-developed systems to enhance the quality of information provision (and particularly the distribution of information materials) to service users. Increasingly lack of, or the distribution of incorrect information during the consent to treatment process is an alleged factor in cases where damages are sought.
The Clinical Negligence and Other Risks Indemnity Scheme (CNORIS) has developed comprehensive risk management standards for NHSScotland. Standard 7 of the CNORIS risk management framework addresses the provision of information to patients about
"the risks and benefits of proposed treatments or investigations". This standard encourages healthcare providers to reduce their risk by, for example, having a structured and regulated framework for the provision of patient information. This includes information about the risks and benefits of the most common treatments, and having a policy for the composition and format of literature produced by the organisation.
Each document should contain the following details:
| Date produced |
| Version number |
| Review date |
| Author |
| Department |
| Contact details |
| Database reference. |
A robust process will help to minimise the provision of inaccurate or out-of-date information. A central register will enable immediate identification of existing information, so preventing duplication of effort and resource; and acts as a source of reference to those wanting to supplement the information already available.
A distribution list, naming the recipients, would ensure that a system exists to recall out-of-date information, though materials copied and distributed would not qualify here. With the above list of properties attached to a document, however, all reasonable steps will have been taken to alert the reader whether the information they are using is the most current.
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