Guidelines and Reports Introduction

Guidelines can act as a supplement to your consultation and provide guidance for patient care and a means of data entry. They might include a recommended prescribing regime, or patient advice which you can print out and give to the patient. You can build up the guidelines yourself and allow them to be either GP specific, or used by the whole practice.

Guidelines can be:

  • Local Guidelines - These can be either created yourself or imported. They can include patient advice, which can be printed and given to the patient, or a list of appropriate prescribing from which you can select.
    See Available Guidelines to Download for Guidelines to import or Local Guidelines for further details.
  • Management Plans - These are Local Guidelines in grid format which make data entry easier. You can reach these from the patient record by right clicking some entries from the navigation pane and selecting Management Plan. The selected plan displays on the Management tab.
  • Patient Reports - These Guidelines are created primarily to view and print existing information, filtered in specific ways, about a patient or group. They can be either
    • Standard reports, for example, an Encounter form, Medical History, Asthma Management, or
    • Practice defined, variations of the Standard Reports, amended to suit your practice. For example, you might design a report to send to the next practice when a patient is removed.

    Reports can be viewed on screen or printed. The main difference between local guidelines and reports is that double clicking on a report from the Index list in the Management tab goes straight to print, while a guideline initially displays on your screen.

    See Patient Reports Overview for further details.

Patient Reports and Guidelines work in a similar way, many of the actions are the same for viewing both guidelines and report. Selection of a report and guideline can be made from the same Select Guideline screen.

Note - If you want a report on a patient who is asking see all their computer information under the Data Protection Act, you are advised to print this from Search and Reports - Full Patient Report. Patient Reports are not complete enough for this purpose.

See If you want to create your own guidelines, you are advised to follow through the chapter Guidelines and Report Maintenance and Quick Summary - Add a new Report first as a straightforward introduction; and Quick Summary - Add a new Guideline.