Many of our authorisers in the Public Health Wales Microbiology Services have used narrative comments throughout their careers but have tended to reserve the times they are adding a commentary to the more complex issues they are seeing clinically. The approach described here aims to add commentary to more of the laboratory output and in so doing, increase the impact. The narrative report challenges the person responding to think further about the patient referred to in the report. This takes more time. Through new funding, we have increased the pool of clinical biomedical scientists who have been enhancing this work since January 2021.
The biographies of the core team are available in the “Team” page. We asked them to reflect on their experiences of narrative reporting:
An unexpected benefit of the coronavirus pandemic was how the NHS in Wales went on adopt Microsoft Teams as a standard for meeting communication. We had previously explored similar technologies for training but having our own team in this space has allowed to meet on a daily basis, which allows for collective discussion of difficult cases and how they can be handled. We also use our space to develop and hold copies of training manuals, competency documents, audit documents as well as the spreadsheets with common comments.
We are a growing group of individuals across Wales, currently within Public Health Wales but with a desire to include microbiologists from any of our health boards because we use a common all Wales Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). We invite other to get in touch if they want to explore using our approach in their own practice. The Contacts tab provides details.