About
What this is
39 text blocks for respiratory clinics, each one showing the guideline or trial it rests on. Search, copy, paste into the record.
Where it came from
In April 2024 Dr Angshu Bhowmik sent a new registrar at the Homerton a set of the auto-texts he used with his dictation software, with a note saying they were by no means perfect, that he changed them from time to time, and that if we all helped each other out with good examples of letters this might be a good thing. That is the whole idea of this site. His originals are the seed: the clerking skeleton, the bronchiectasis advice, the sputum collection instructions and the discharge letters started as his.
What has been added is the sourcing. Every clinical block here names the national or international guideline it follows, and where a specific trial is the reason a sentence says what it says, that trial is linked to its record on respiratorytrials.org. The point is not that these blocks are right. It is that when one of them is wrong, you can see where it came from and fix it.
How the blocks are meant to be used
Square brackets are fields, left empty on purpose. Angshu's convention was the empty pair
[], because Dragon's "Manage auto-texts" function treats it as a stop you jump
between with F1 and F2. Some blocks name the field inside the brackets when the name is not
obvious from the line it sits on. Either way, what the copy button puts on your clipboard is
exactly the plain text you see, with nothing added — no formatting, no citations, no
attribution line.
Patient-facing blocks are written to be read by the patient in a clinic letter: plain English, no abbreviations, and instructions someone can actually act on. Clinician-facing blocks are written for the record.
What it is not
It is not a guideline, not a protocol, and not a substitute for having thought about the patient. A template makes it easy to write a fluent letter about a consultation that did not happen; that risk is the price of the time it saves, and it is yours to manage. Nothing here is approved by any trust, college or society.
It holds no patient data and asks for none. Nothing is typed into this site — you copy from it, and the filling in happens in your own record system.
How it is built
A static site generated from plain YAML by a Python script, the same way its sister site is
built. One file per block. Nothing is checked in that has not passed
validate.py, which fails the build on a block missing its evidence, a trial
reference that does not exist on respiratorytrials.org, a stray smart quote that would arrive
in a letter as a replacement character, or a block no one has reviewed for eighteen months.
Corrections
Blocks go out of date the moment a guideline moves. If something here is wrong, or if you have a better version of it, that is the most useful thing you can send.