about the project

Lowland Rescue, the UKs second biggest Search & Rescue Charity in the UK, is comprised of Trustees elected from its member teams, and Operational Officers who develop standards and governance.

The business requirements

Lowland Rescue, the UKs second biggest Search & Rescue Charity in the UK, is comprised of Trustees elected from its member teams, and Operational Officers who develop standards and governance.

Lowland Rescue approached chilliapple to build a custom-built system to assist their medical teams. They were looking to hire Laravel developers to help them create a range of modules for their existing platform that provides management systems for their national Search & Rescue Teams.

The new modules would then need to assist Rescue Team Members to report every incident in detail including: incident information (location and Rescue Team), casualty information, treatments required, equipment used, patient observations (pulse, temperature, glucose levels etc.) and how the patient was attended to.

Our solution

Laravel was the chosen PHP framework and chilliapple created a backend where the business logic for all the logging and reporting medical incidents are managed. The system was built with the following key functions to be integrated:

PRF Recording – The Clinical Government – Patient Report Form (CG-PRF) component was designed to record every PRF that is submitted by a team member. It was envisaged that the final data entry UI would be tab based, allowing the data entry user to step through the UI form in the same way as they would complete a form in the field including data such as Rescue Team, location of incident, date/time on scene and casualty information.
Clinical Governance Recording – The Clinical Government – Continual Professional Development (CG-CPD) recording component was designed to record every item of development that a member undertakes that will further their clinical skills and knowledge. Each record is related to a user in the user database. This was built with flexibility in mind to allow Lowland Rescue to record non-medical CPDs in the future.
Reporting and Metrics – This component was built to enable the user to produce reports by filtering the fields and produce the final output in a format that is easy to digest on screen and can be dropped into either XLS/CSV or PDF formats.

The results

Laravel is a great tool to build bespoke PHP projects. It is simple, robust and an incredibly well supported system which has made incorporating into Lowland Rescue’s current Laravel system more straight forward than other coding languages. Laravel automatically allows for form validation, data storage, caching, etc.

Administration of these complicated medical incidents and records was a main goal for the project. chilliapple have developed a clear system of filterable data was brought together within a unique dashboard, allowing defined user roles to add/upload and edit patient notes and dictations whilst easily retrieving information and downloading reports to a specified date range.