What is Patient Status?

Patient Status is a configurable workflow stage that tracks where a patient is in their care journey within your organisation. Each status represents a step in the patient's progression through care, helping staff quickly understand what stage each patient has reached and improving visibility of patient flow across your teams.

No special permissions required. All organisational users can view patient status. Any user who can view a patient can update their status (except for patients marked as INACTIVE).

Patient Status is displayed throughout CAREFUL -- in patient tables, team views, and individual patient profiles. It's not a separate feature with its own page, but rather a key patient attribute that helps you:

• Track care progression: See where patients are in their treatment journey
• Aid prioritisation: Colour-coded badges help staff quickly assess patient stages
• Enable filtering: Filter patient lists by status to focus on specific groups
• Maintain audit trails: All status changes are logged with timestamp and user information

Your organisation's administrator configures the specific statuses you'll see (for example: Expected, Arrived, Reviewed, Admitted, Ready for Discharge, Discharged). Each status has a distinct colour and represents a sequential step in your care workflow.

Three standard statuses appear across all organisations:

• No Status: The patient has not yet been assigned a status
• Deceased: Indicates the patient is deceased (shows a warning when selected)
• Inactive: Applied automatically when a patient is discharged from all teams -- you cannot manually set this status, and patients with this status cannot have their status updated

In Patient Lists

1. From the sidebar, select My Patients or click Teams and select a team name
2. The patient table displays a Status column showing:
   • A colour-coded badge with the status name (or "No Status")
   • How long the patient has been in that status (e.g., "3 days ago")
   • The timestamp of the last status update
   • The name of the user who last updated the status

In Patient Profiles

1. Click any patient from a patient list to open their profile
2. Select the Profile tab (if not already displayed)
3. Locate the Status field in the patient details section
4. The status is displayed with the same colour-coded badge, duration, and update information
5. A pencil icon indicates you can click to update the status (unless the patient is INACTIVE)

1. From My Patients or any team view, click the filter icon (funnel) in the top-right corner
2. The filter panel expands to show a Patient status: dropdown
3. Click the dropdown to see available options:
   • Active Patients (default -- shows all non-inactive patients)
   • No status (shows only patients with no status assigned)
   • Your organisation's custom statuses
4. Select a status to filter the patient list
5. The filter icon remains highlighted to indicate an active filter

The Inactive status is automatically hidden from the filter dropdown.

1. Navigate to a patient profile and select the Profile tab
2. Click anywhere on the Status field (look for the pencil icon)
3. The "Update patient status" dialog opens, displaying:
   • Current status: Shows the patient's current status (read-only)
   • New status: Dropdown list of available statuses
   • Date of change (optional): Date and time picker for backdating status changes
4. Click the New status dropdown and select the new status
5. Optionally, set a custom date and time:
   • Click the calendar icon to choose a specific date and time
   • Or click the clock icon to quickly set it to the current time
   • Leave empty to use the current timestamp
6. Review any warnings that appear:
   • If you select the same status as current, an error message explains you must choose a different status
   • If you select Deceased, a warning asks you to confirm this is correct
   • If you move the status backwards in the workflow, a warning asks you to confirm
   • If you set a future date, an error prevents submission until corrected
7. Click Submit
8. The dialog closes and all patient lists refresh to show the updated status

The patient's status badge now displays the new status with its colour, the duration resets, and your name appears as the user who updated it.

• Use status filters to focus on specific patient groups (e.g., all patients "Ready for Discharge")
• The colour-coding helps you spot patients at critical stages at a glance
• Status changes are fully audited -- check the patient's Log tab to see the complete status history
• You can backdate status changes if you're updating records retrospectively
• The "Active Patients" filter (default) is useful for seeing your current caseload without inactive or discharged patients