What is an Action?

You can assign an unlimited number of actions to a message in Mail Manager. The Actions tab in Mail Maintenance is where the text of actions is defined. The actions are displayed in the tree view as follows:

An action is essentially a note attached to the message in Mail Manager. It consists of details of the text of the action, who created it and when, who is responsible for the action and the date on which the action was taken, the current action status (marked by Action Status), whether complete or not, a patient-specific flag and an action code.

All actions assigned to a message in Mail Manager are held in the Actions within Mail Maintenance. It is not possible to assign an ad-hoc action to a message in Mail Manager, although it is possible to edit the text of an existing action in Mail Maintenance. This allows actions to be searchable.

Actions are presented to you in a two-stage list:

• Frequent Actions
• Additional Actions

Initially the most frequently used actions are presented in a list in Mail Manager. By pressing More, you can see the full list of available actions.

All actions are definable in the in Mail Maintenance under Actions. Theoretically the list of Frequent Actions is unbounded. In practice, however, the list soon becomes unmanageable. The items which appear in the Frequent Actions list and the order in which they appear is therefore definable under the Actions tab.

Since action codes are designed to be searchable, it is not possible to delete an action. Instead actions can be marked as Discontinued. These codes are then available for searching but not for assigning to a message.

The order of items in the Frequent Actions group is user-definable and driven by the display order in the database. Under Additional Actions and Discontinued Actions, the order is alphabetical.

In the list view (the top right-hand pane), a number of items are displayed if either Frequent Actions heading or Additional Action heading is selected. Otherwise the details for the single item are displayed in the following columns:

• Text
• Default Staff/Group
• Patient-specific
• Display order (applicable only when the Frequent Actions heading is selected)
• Created/edited – the date the record was last edited
• Edited By – the person who performed the edit

Due to the complexity of editing under Actions, it is not anticipated that changes be written to the database as soon as they are made. Rather there will be a ‘Save’ button and a prompt to save on exit. Action code maintenance, for this reason, will be single-user.