East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust has deployed Nervecentre’s digital care plans at Lister Hospital in Stevenage, with the aim of improving staff access to information to keep patients safe.
The roll-out follows a pilot earlier in the summer, which saw Nervecentre’s plans deployed in two Lister wards, a 566-bed general and an acute district hospital.
The hospital was already using Nervecentre for e-observations, NEWS2 escalations and AKI alerts, fluid balance, and in its emergency department. All remaining adult inpatient wards in Lister have been included in the roll-out as part of the trust’s Keeping our Patients Safe (KOPS) programme, which focuses on improving clinical decision-making by replacing paper processes with digital tools.
Before KOPS, nurses were handwriting assessment and care plans, which meant that these paper documents were isolated from other aspects of the care records and access was limited. Lister’s nurses are now capturing details of assessment, notes and observations in Nervecentre on mobile devices at the patient’s bedside. The information is made visible to clinical and operational teams as soon as it is known, forming an integrated part of real-time electronic patient records.
“It’s helped us out so much, especially with our patient food charts and fluids – it’s so much easier to record everything,” said Clinical Support Worker Lauren Butterfield. “With the digital risk assessments we can now help the nurses out more, and we know how many patients need extra support. It’s definitely a big step forward to have this.”
Ward Manager Cecile Gascon commented: “The digitalisation of care plans and assessments saves us time as it’s very accessible, and it’s cost-effective as we don’t need to print paper anymore. There is better communication between the multidisciplinary team as it’s all in one system, and makes it much quicker to do audits. The doctors can actually do things remotely too, for instance prescribing medication without needing to come into the ward to prescribe in the drug chart.”
“Our mission at Nervecentre is to make the NHS run on real-time data,” said Paul Volkaerts, CEO at Nervecentre. “Digital care plans are a great example of how NHS trusts can digitise paper-based care, using mobile technology and real-time data to provide safer and more efficient healthcare services.”
