transfer to differnt departments?

[Sprool]

Can someone explain to me how this works - transferring patients to different departments?

[Cas]

All you have to do is click the department symbol near the top of the patient card - this will then show you a list of icons for the different departments you can click on.

Note that you cannot change department whilst a patient is collapsed/being stabilised initially.

[Sprool]

Sorry - should have explained better - under what circumstances would you need to do this?

[Tankfriend]

You usually do that when
a) the current department cannot provide the treatment necessary for the disease the patient has.
b) the current department has exhausted all diagnostic options, but the disease has still not been identified
c) a patient is in very bad shape and needs to be sent to the ICU to counteract or prevent a collapse

[Cas]

Generally it’s only required if the department the patient is in cannot offer the treatment needed, or the current department has ran out of diagnostics to run.

E.g. if you had an emergency patient who was diagnosed as having one of the general surgery conditions that require proton pump inhibitor treatment - your emergency doctors cannot prescribe this as it is outside their speciality. So instead you transfer the patient to general surgery where the doctors can prescribe proton pump inhibitors.
Same as surgery - your emergency department may diagnose something that needs laparoscopic surgery, that patient needs to be transferred to the correct department to be treated fully.

There is some overlap so you don’t have to transfer for everything - but if you hover over the final diagnosis there will be a tooltip with more info, and an icon indicating which department the condition is ‘best’ treated by.

Transferring can also help with diagnosis sometimes - you may have a patient in emergency who has had lots of tests but still only has a few symptoms showing, if you have an idea of what it might be - let’s say patient has vomiting, diarrhoea we might think it’s some kind of digestive system issue - so we can assign them to general surgery. The general surgery doctor then has more tests available such as CT enterography or Gastroscopy (which an emergency doctor cannot do) which may find the missing symptoms needed to confirm diagnosis.