Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with a digital task management solution from Infinity Health to move away from pagers and paper.
The system has been introduced to support out of hours staff, covering medical and surgical in-patient wards, coordinate and prioritise tasks. It means staff can now request an out of hours coordinator through the platform, create a to-do list of tasks, for the staff member to see the tasks allocated to them, the location, and then to accept and action.
The trust said the new system has helped remove pagers, paper and the use of spreadsheets, and has helped support prioritisation of tasks.
Matthew Beebee, Out of Hours Coordinator at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, commented: “I find using the Infinity system hugely beneficial in allocating tasks to doctors in a timely manner. Being able to add a task immediately to Infinity after receiving a call from the wards, and not needing to wait for a doctor to reply to my bleep makes the workload much more manageable.”
Dr Luke Gompels, Chief Clinical Information Officer at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, added: “Working with Infinity Health has helped us to improve how patient related tasks can be allocated, accepted, and tracked at the touch of a button. This has reduced interruptions from bleeps, releasing time back to doctors, and contributing to a safer, less stressful working environment during the night.
“Senior colleagues at the trust are able to gain a better understanding of what’s happening across the hospital, meaning they can more effectively support our junior doctors with team working and ensuring they have more time to take breaks.”
Elliott Engers, CEO at Infinity Health, said: “Out of hours teams are always under intense pressure, having to balance multiple priorities and make split-second decisions in a skeleton team covering huge numbers of patients. It is therefore absolutely critical that they have the best tools to coordinate and prioritise care in the safest and most efficient way.
Infinity Health is one of the innovations featured in the HTN Digital Playbook, helping to raise awareness of solutions across a number of categories, including the category their solution featured in, supporting collaboration and communication.
HTN recently highlighted a case study at Somerset NHS FT, how the organisation has introduced a system for incident and risk management.
