Clinical Observations

This guidance is under active development by NHS Digital and content may be added or updated on a regular basis.

Clinical Observations

Early Warning Scores

This Implementation Guide is in support of a project to develop and mature the standards for observations data capture. The aim is to share observations along the patient pathway and across organisational boundaries. The proposed design is a generic approach to clinical observations and Early Warning Scores (EWS).

The specification supports sharing of EWS final score and associated Vital Signs and their sub-scores from Electronic Patient Records (EPRs) to third party applications.

Other possible use cases where this specification might apply include:

  • Hospital to hospital patient transfer

  • A vital signs app to an Electronic Patient Record in a hospital

  • Ambulance to Emergency Department

  • Hospital look up of observations in GP systems. This will enable hospitals to import the Vital Signs observations from GP Systems to build a single record of observations around a patient, to provide a baseline and trends available to all.

  • Ambulance recording on remote devices and communicating to central ambulance record

  • GP to Ambulance

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