Most individual services listed on Care Opinion have one or more treatment functions. The treatment function describes the kind of care the service provides.
What treatment functions are there?
Currently there are about 170 treatment functions on Care Opinion. For example:
- General surgery
- Emergency medicine
- Paediatric dermatology
- Respite care
- Orthoptics
- Addiction services
- Dementia care
If you are logged into Care Opinion you can see the whole list on the TF page, or on the search page when you add a search filter for a treatment function.
Every treatment function has a name and a numeric code.
Why do services have treatment functions?
Treatment functions help to describe what services provide. You might think that what a service provides is already obvious from the name: for example, the maternity service provides maternity care.
But some services have names which do not make it immediately obvious what the service provides. For example, can you guess what these services do?
By describing services using treatment functions, we can make it easier for story authors and staff find the services they are interested in.
How are treatment functions used on Care Opinion?
Treatment functions are used in various ways on Care Opinion. For example:
- When an author shares a story, we use treatment functions to help us suggest services which the story might be about.
- You can add treatment function filters to your searches. This allows you to search for stories about all the services in your organisation which provide the same kind of care.
- Because searches are the basis for other assets like reports, alerts and visualisations, this makes it easy to create these assets for services across your organisation that share a treatment function, even if they are in diverse locations.
As an example consider Borsetshire Healthcare, which runs community health services, including nine different community hospitals. Each hospital provides a podiatry clinic, among other things. There is also a mobile podiatry clinic.
Lisa is the podiatry service manager for Borsetshire and would like alerts and reports for all the services she manages. She can go about this in two different ways:
- She could create a search which explicitly includes each of the 10 services of interest, and use that to create alerts and reports.
- She could create a search which just filters for stories about podiatry services, and use that. All the relevant services will be included automatically.
The advantages of the second approach are that (a) it is quicker and (b) if a further podiatry service is added to the tree, the stories will be included without having to change the alerts or reports.