The Podiatrist's Quick Referral Guide

This library ends each clinical series with a handover document, and the podiatry edition is meant to be the shortest in the series, as the campaign's honest premise is that the referral touch point in podiatry is small, so is the time between patients.

The profession needs a one-page artefact that serves three functions: turns the foot care essentials into a support plan when the chair has brought all these together, alerts the family and GP to the broader picture if the chair has brought these together, and takes 5 minutes during the patient to patient transition. Each part is adapted from one of the articles of this campaign.

The one-page guide

The patient. One sentence, the library's standard opening, at minimum scale, who this is and how they like to be helped, because even the shortest handover in the collection encounters a person first.

The daily routine, as a checklist. The washing and drying was condensed into the first article; moisturising and exceptions to it; the socks and footwear discipline, from the fourth article; the inspection and who does what of it, in the day's order, tickable.

The never-items. The high-risk absolutes with one-line reasons: no cutting or filing, no treating anything found, no walking without shoes, no heat sources on the neuropathic feet, whatever this patient's risk profile adds.

The watch-list and the line. Plain language list, same-day rule, the photo option if consented and the clinic number that answers, with the culture line included in writing: a call about nothing is the system working.

The attendance block. The standing appointment schedule from the second article, and the relay note: the worker reports the fortnight, and takes the new routine home.

Consent and currency. The standard closing, the patient's consent to the information travelling, and the re-issue triggers: any wound, any risk-status change, any new footwear prescription.

The doubled use

The second life of the template is the flag: where the chair has seen the decline picture of this campaign's fifth article, the five minutes has yielded the two-sentence note to the GP, the observations, the task-question answers, the suggestion of assessment, which this library's GP series will exchange with its own machinery. Podiatry's part in this system is precisely this: the small, often unsuspecting, close contact touch point who sees first and says so, in writing, briefly, to the people whose series carry it away from there.

How this plays out in practice

Imagine one template carrying the campaign. The neuropathic widower's guide finds his new morning arrangement, routine and never items, watch list, and the same-day call of article one in month 4, when the document is placed on the refrigerator. The transport block is a way to make an article two DNA regular into a standing attendee. Article five's decline picture goes to the GP as two sentences that start everything that the GP series describes. One template, 5 minutes per use and the whole clinical argument, the daily surveillance, kept attendance, early flags, become operational at the lowest possible cost to podiatry.

Next steps

This week create the template and utilise it for the next high-risk patient who is supported at home, or needs to be supported at home. After five minutes, one page, and the chair's knowledge, it goes.