Carers vs Support Workers Know the Difference Patients and their families will use the term ‘carer’ to describe two different support roles and this creates a clinical risk. • Unpaid Carers are partners in care and can be the Person Responsible for making decisions.
• Paid Disability Support Workers are different; they have no rights to access carer services or make decisions about care. They need explicit permission from the NUM and NDIS before working on a ward. Clinical terminology must be accurate to minimise potential risk to care and clinical outcomes.
• Staff must discover which role the person has and document it in the patient notes on eMR.
• Staff must be diligent in using the correct terminology when speaking with colleagues, in case conferences, and in writing progress notes. People with disability deserve equitable care. Unnecessary clinical risks should be reduced. • This will take a whole-of-hospital approach; we will need each other’s support to achieve the accuracy required to mitigate risks. • The community will probably use incorrect terms for some time, but health professionals are known to overcome challenges. Diab or Diab HE? eMR diet orders for Diabetic patients As part of our ongoing efforts to provide optimal care for patients with Diabetes the Nutrition and Dietetics department recently completed a review of our Diabetic (Diab) vs Diabetic Higher Energy (Diab HE) eMR diet ordering practices, the clinical impact of the carbohydrate portion allowance on a patient’s blood glucose levels on both the types of diets and their overall nutrition profile. We benchmarked this against practices at other hospitals and discussed the outcome with our relevant stakeholders. Based on the above we are now in the process of implementing a change to our practice as follows: • Please choose ‘ Diab diet ‘instead of the ‘Diab HE’ diet when placing a diet order in eMR for your patients with diabetes. • Please place a dietitian referral via eMR AH Consults if you have any concerns ( e.g. Malnutrition / Pressure injuries/ falls / anorexia and subsequent poor intake / unstable BGLs) with respect to the nutrition care of your patients with Diabetes. The dietitians will be booking in ward based in- services to provide more information on this change to our diet ordering practice.
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