Articles on: Notes

How do I manage locking for notes?

You can choose between two options for managing the locking of notes in WriteUpp:

Auto lock ON - Your notes lock automatically after 24 hours
Auto lock OFF - No automatic locking of notes (editability is maintained with the protection of version history)

Importantly, in both cases, version history has been fully implemented, so you have a full audit trail of changes made to the note. You also have the ability to manually lock a note (thereby rendering it non-editable) if you wish to do so.

You can change the Auto lock setting for your site using the 'Auto lock' switch under Settings -> General (Admin only). Auto lock is set to off by default (see below). If you would like WriteUpp to automatically lock your notes after 24 hours, simply toggle the switch to the right.

If auto lock is turned off, notes will continue to be editable and will not be locked after 24 hours. However, version history (described below) provides protection, by allowing you to see every change that has been made to a note, when it was made and by whom.

To see the version history for a note, go to the Patient Summary, select the Notes tab and open an existing note. At the bottom of the screen click on View History:

You'll then see a modal detailing the history of the note and a preview of the content below:

From here, clicking on the eye icon within a line will open up that particular version of the note, as it was when it was saved:

You won't be able to make any changes to the historic versions here. To modify the current version, click Back at the bottom of the screen to return to the note in its current editable state.

If, for any reason, you want to lock a note so that it is no longer editable regardless of the auto lock setting, you can click on the lock icon at the bottom of the screen, as below:

This will ONLY appear if you have previously saved a note. When you click on it, you will be warned that locking it will prevent further amendments, as below:

The appearance of this message may differ between browsers.

When you click on OK, the screen will refresh, the note will be locked and the icon at the bottom of the screen will change to reflect this, as below:

Hovering the mouse over the icon will show who locked the note.

Site Administrators have the ability to unlock a manually or automatically locked note created by either themselves or another user. If a note has been prematurely locked to changes, just click on the key icon at the bottom of the screen to unlock it again:

NOTE: Only Site Administrators can unlock notes. If another user type (privileged, regular or restricted) has prematurely locked a note that they now want to edit again, they will have to ask the Site Administrator to unlock it for them!

You'll then see confirmation that it's been unlocked, with no need to save the changes to take this into account.

Please note that if an Administrator unlocks a note and then edits and saves it, this will transfer the edit rights to them and the original creator will no longer be able to edit it (unless they are also a Site Administrator). Therefore, if you need to unlock something for one of your users, just click on the key icon and exit straight out of the note by going elsewhere in WriteUpp (e.g. to the diary). Then, just let them know it's unlocked!

Updated on: 08/11/2023

Was this article helpful?

Thank you!