Nottingham launches guidance app

A physician at the Nottingham University NHS Trust has developed an app to make it easier for new doctors to access treatment guidance documents.

The NUH Guidelines app, available for Apple and Android devices , is designed to replace hundreds of pages of online guidance documents stored on the trust’s intranet.

Dr Adrian Kwa, who developed the app and is leading a patient safety project at the trust, told EHI he was inspired to create the app by the difficulty of finding relevant guidance documents online.

“At the time, clinical guidelines were quite difficult to find on the intranet system – they weren’t always intuitive to find and the search function didn’t work very well.”

Kwa said the app provides access to more than 600 guidance documents, all of which can be reached within three clicks using the menu system.

“The point is to think in terms of where staff would be looking for the guidelines, rather than where the trust would be hiding them.”

Users can search for the guidelines by the relevant condition, with the information able to be found more than one way.

The app also allows offline access for mobile working. Users are required to have online access at least once every 30 days to ensure the guidelines are up to date, with access to certain functions restricted if the synchronisation does not take place.

Kwa said the app team worked with over 145 doctors and nurses to get their feedback on issues with existing access to the guidelines and determine how they would search for guidelines.

A prototype of the app had received positive feedback from doctors and nurses, and the new version has already been downloaded more than 500 times.

Kwa said the project was supported by the Nottingham Hospitals Charity, and the trust is looking into how it can make the app platform available to other trusts.

“We’ve found that guidelines are an inherent problem across trusts, but nobody’s had a good solution to do it yet, and I think it should be shared rather than sold to other people.”