There’s an increasing recognition that high-quality healthcare revolves around the delivery of personalised care. This is particularly true for the millions of people who live with long-term conditions and often require care and support from different care settings and health professions.
The delivery of good, personalised care can be even more complex in emergency situations, when a person may be unable to express their wishes or make a decision about their treatment. While care planning is just as important for these situations as it is for non-acute scenarios, it’s an area which has historically been neglected. Failure to understand what a person would want in these situations, or to have an informed conversation with them or those close to them about their
preferences, can have serious implications.
The ReSPECT process has been developed by many stakeholders including patients, bereaved carers, doctors, nurses, and ambulance clinicians. It’s been designed to encourage an informed and open discussion between patients and health professionals, to record a patient’s preferences and provide guidance to health and care professionals needing to make immediate decisions in an emergency situation.
The ReSPECT form records recommendations to guide that decision-making in an emergency, including decisions about CPR. Applicable to all ages, in all care settings, the form can be used everywhere from hospitals to hospices to community and ambulance services. Since making the summary form and supporting materials available just over a year ago, there has been an enormous interest and enthusiasm for ReSPECT across the NHS and beyond. To support this work, we have been working with NHS Scotland to enable digital sharing of ReSPECT forms, which is currently being reviewed by the PRSB.
Discussions have also been opened to explore the opportunities to develop appropriate FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) profiles, which is a technical messaging standard that allows the different components of a record(e.g. patient details, allergies, diagnosis) to be communicated between systems and
used to update the information held in the receiving system directly.
The ReSPECT process is also supported by the PRSB’s new digital care and support plan standard, which has the potential to draw attention to a person’s ReSPECT form and its content. Giving people who receive care more autonomy over their decisions is an essential part of personalised care and it’s something we want to see develop in the future.
If you’re interested in finding out more about the PRSB’s work with ReSPECT or how you can improve personalisation in care through the use of standards, please get in touch at info@theprsb.org. You can also contact Resuscitation Council UK directly on info@respectprocess.org.uk.
