Bolton NHS Foundation Trust is using new technology which allows it to better manage care for patients at night, improve communication between nurses and doctors, and manage staff workloads.
Patients in need of attention for everything from chest pains to seizures on wards at night, are receiving better and faster co-ordinated responses from nurses and doctors, after the Trust deployed a system called Patientrack. The Trust is the first in the country to use the technology solely to help manage the hospital at night.
Nurses are now using Patientrack to log more quickly when their patients need a doctor’s attention for anything from chest pains to compromised airways, seizures, high early warning scores, and a wide range of other urgent and less urgent tasks.
Patientrack immediately sends tasks raised at the bedside and accompanying information to Bolton’s hospital at night team, where staff use the system to quickly allocate the task to an appropriate doctor, with a secure alert sent directly to the doctor’s mobile phone. This contains links to information about the location and condition of the patient, details about the action required, and a timeframe in which a response is needed.
Nurses no longer need to spend time manually filling out task forms, which are now automatically populated with patient information from the hospital’s patient administration system. And doctors are no longer taken away from treating patients to respond to bleeps.
Dr Simon Irving, acute physician and chief clinical information officer at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, said: “Patientrack is helping to ensure doctors don’t become overwhelmed trying to find a phone or a PC, when they need to remain with a patient, and has removed the need for nurses to manually bleep only to wait for a response.
“Previously when doctors were bleeped they would not have access to the reason without logging on to a terminal. Now doctors working at night can accept, complete, and even reject when necessary, tasks assigned to them directly on their mobile phone, where they can review information without breaking them from their current task. We can also specify a minimum level of doctor to complete a task, boosting patient safety. The process is much more effective.”
Donald Kennedy, managing director at Patientrack, added: “Bolton’s determination to rollout technology quickly to support the hospital’s patient safety ambitions is admirable. The Trust has become the first in the country to use Patientrack solely to tackle challenges that come with delivering care in the hospital at night. We look forward to continuing to work with the Trust to respond to further frontline demands in the future.”
