January 1996, 14pp.
In general, the management of a patient is a co-operative activity involving doctors, nurses, and many support staff such as paramedics and physiotherapists. There is currently much interest in modeling this process of care in order to manage resources better, to audit the quality of care actually provided, and to establish clinical guidelines. This paper presents a formal notation for clinical procedures; a procedure is represented by a goal-oriented hierarchy of simple flowcharts. General correctness properties of the procedure model can be specified in mathematical logic, and use of a computer enables the model to be validated against its specification. By means of a concealment operator, a model can be simplified to show the rôle of just one individual in the entire procedure. This enables, for example, separate clinical guidelines for doctors and nurses to be extracted from the overall model.