Organisations vary widely in size and complexity, and so service trees will also be very different. Some service trees may include just a handful of services, while others may have hundreds of services.
As you create your service tree, keep the following points in mind:
- A service should only be included if it is something accessed by the public. We don’t list services only available to staff, such as occupational health care.
- A service should only be included if it is the point of care, but not if it simply provided in the course of care. For example, we would list a coronary care unit as a service, but not the catering or the wifi.
- Any service must have one single parent (no more and no less).
- A service cannot be added in two places on your service tree.
- It is easy to create a service tree which is so complex that nobody (you, us and patients) can understand it. A good service tree finds a balance between being too simple and too complex
- Likewise, a service name should make sense to both patients and staff, avoiding unfamiliar acronyms.
Grouping services: by location or by function?
Sometimes it is hard to know whether to group services by location or function. For example, imagine five small community hospitals, each offering a minor injury unit, a maternity service and a physiotherapy service. Should the service tree be grouped:
- By location first, with each hospital showing its three services?
- Or by function first, with a maternity service group listing the five locations for that specialty?
A good principle to bear in mind is: how are patients most likely to look for and find the services listed?
Usually,if services have obvious and well-known locations (like a hospital) it is best to go location-first. For community services, which are often team-based with no well-known public location, it is best to go function first.
Don’t let reporting needs dictate the service tree
Sometimes people try to structure a tree to meet specific reporting needs. For example, a manager might have responsibility for three different services in different locations. They might think that to ensure they can have reports or alerts covering all three services, they must be grouped together on the tree.
In fact, reporting and alerting are very flexible and don’t need services to be grouped together. There are a number of simple ways that reports can include services from different parts of a complex tree.
Design your service tree so that it will make the most sense to the most people (patients/service users and staff), not so that it meets the specific needs of very few people.
If you need a service tree adding, this means that we currently have no information at all about your organisation on Care Opinion. The creation of your service tree should be done in collaboration with your Care Opinion support lead
If you want to make changes to your service tree you can follow the advice on Request changes to a service tree and use the template below
service-tree-change-request-template-apr24.xlsx