Care Pathways

• 1. What is the Map of Medicine?
• 2. What benefits does Map of Medicine bring?
• 3. How are the pathways accessed?
• 4. Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia Screening Pathway
• 5. Mapping exercise
• 6. Failsafe
• 7. Files

1. What is the Map of Medicine?

Map of Medicine is a visual representation of evidence-based, practice-informed care pathways for common and important conditions.

The UK National Screening Committing decided that the Map of Medicine was the best way to develop and present all the English screening care pathways in a consistent manner.

Each pathway is a simple flowchart (made up of connected “nodes”), read from top to bottom, which starts with a summary of the screening programme and then shows the core stages and decision points in the screening process. Each node represents part of the process and if the node has a small “i” in the corner then it can be clicked on to get more detailed information.

The pathways always make clear what the evidence is on which they are based, when they were last reviewed and when they are next due for review. This ensures that they can always be relied on for accurate information.

You can find out more on the Map of Medicine website and on the UK Screening Portal.

2. What benefits does Map of Medicine bring?

The Map of Medicine pathways will bring a number of benefits, including:

• Consistency of presentation will make it easy to compare pathways and share best practice across programmes
• Pathways will be easily and quickly available to everyone who needs them
• The pathways bring all the evidence for each screening programme together in one place
• They will provide a useful resource for commissioners and also for training new staff and keeping the knowledge of existing staff up to date
• They will have a vital role in Quality Assurance and introducing failsafe mechanisms to minimise mistakes and incidents

3. How are the pathways accessed?

The Map of Medicine pathways are freely available (no log in required) for health professionals through NHS Evidence. They are also available to the public through the NHS Choices “Healthguides”.

4. Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia Screening Pathway

View the interactive Map of Medicine pathway:

• On NHS Choices
• On NHS Evidence

5. Mapping exercise

We have worked with the regional teams to map the screening pathway across England using a mapping questionnaire. The report is available here.

6. Failsafe

A failsafe is a mechanism to reduce risk.  It is the back up mechanism, in addition to usual care which ensures if something goes wrong in the screening pathway, processes are in place to identify the error and correct it before any harm occurs.

The NHS Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia Screening Programme's Failsafe Processes document has been produced to provide the public and health care professionals information about the quality of the screening programme.

The Newborn Bloodspot Failsafe Processes can also be found here 

You can read about the background on why it was important to establish a failsafe proof of concept.