Care Pathways

• 1. What is the Map of Medicine?
• 2. What benefits does Map of Medicine bring?
• 3. How are the pathways accessed?
• 4. Newborn blood spot screening pathway
• 5. Newborn blood spot screening pathway - flow diagram
• 6. Screening timeline
• 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 Committee 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, which 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. Newborn blood spot screening pathway

View the interactive Map of Medicine pathway:

• On NHS Choices
• On NHS Evidence

5. Newborn blood spot screening pathway - flow diagram

The newborn blood spot screening pathway demonstrating interdependencies between maternity services, newborn screening laboratories, specialist teams, child health records departments and primary care. A PDF version of the image is available.

6. Screening timeline

The antenatal and newborn screening timeline can be viewed and downloaded from the Continuing Professional Development for Screening website.