The animation discusses what happens when we add a narrative comment to our reports:
The second how is how we do what we do?
To some extent, we have already shown you the basics of Narrative Reporting on the “What” page. Here we will aim to show you in more detail, the nuts and bolts of narrative reporting. This tab will be of particular interest to those who may wish to adopt narrative reporting.
Firstly, Mike Simmons explains how the Excel Spreadsheets that are used to hold free text comments work. This may be of interest to all users of lab systems and offers an alternative to the need to remember codes for comments. However, the “magic formula,” that does all the work is shown in the box below, in case it cannot be viewed in the video is an Excel Function:
=CONCATENATE(DateAuth,” “,Authoriser,” “,B5)
The second video shows specifically how we place the comment into the All Wales Laboratory Information Management System, which is built with TrakCare Lab from Intersystems. This video will therefore be of specific interest to laboratories in Wales that are on this system and elsewhere if you have adopted the same solution. It shows how we arrive at the sort of appearance on our reports as discussed under the “What?” tab. If your system does not allow free text comments or the ability to place the comments anywhere on the report, adoption may be less straight forward.
On the linked pages we have examples of how the urine reports speak into the patients story as the quality of the clinical engagement improves. We also discuss the process our North Wales colleagues are developing narrative reporting for genital samples.