Words: Dick Warner, Managing Director, Class Publishing Ltd.
The JRCALC Guidelines, or – to give them their proper title – The UK Ambulance Services Clinical Practice Guidelines – are the bedrock of ambulance service practice throughout the UK.
From April 2016, for the first time ever, your JRCALC Guidelines will be available as an App called iCPG!
The Joint Royal Colleges Ambulance Liaison Committee (JRCALC) operates independently and has continued to grow under the banner of the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE), which enables continuing responsive updated guidance to be produced in line with advanced in practice and care.
When we published the 2013 Guidelines in print formats, we soon discovered that more and more people wanted their guidelines on their smartphones and tablets. So we set up focus groups from the ambulance services and, as a result of our research with users, and extensive testing, we delivered in 2014 the eBook versions of the 2013 Guidelines.
But, it did not take long for many of our eBook users to tell us that they wanted more, especially these elements: to be able to look things up in their guidelines even when they were out of signal; to get to key information even faster; to be able to ‘filter’ the guidelines by the age of the patient – possibly the only piece of information the despatcher gave you, and you wanted just the information relative to that 7-year-old child; to flag up the guidelines and drug tables that you used most, and remember these for you, so you could hop straight to them; to record the details of each case, anonymously, for later reflective research – perhaps to discuss with colleagues, perhaps for your CPD portfolio; guidelines change, when new research comes on line, you pointed out – so you wanted to be able to subscribe to a service that could keep you up to date, whenever the guidelines changed.
Three years later, after a lot of discussions with our users, with members of the College of Paramedics, with focus groups at events such as The Emergency Services Show, in educational institutions up and down the UK, we have developed something specifically for your smartphone and tablet.
The App is available from the App Store, if you are an Apple user, and from Google Play, if you have an Android device. Once you download the App, you register with Class, through the App, and your subscription begins. You can either subscribe for a month or for a year.
We provide the latest content and information in the Guidelines direct to your phone, with any updates, for as long as your subscription is active. Be warned, once you stop subscribing, and the information becomes potentially out of date, the content is no longer available to you.
Your registration with Class allows you – the registered user – to use iCPG on all your devices, whether iPhones, iPads or Android devices, so you can have access to the latest Guidelines wherever you are.
