Blackpool Teaching Hospital has developed an in-house digital system replacing traditional ‘white-boards’ on 38 adult wards.
The system digitally captures the patient journey from the point of referral to discharge, providing real time information to standardise clinical practice and improve efficiency within the organisation.
Dr Gurkaran Samra said “The user-led need to audit Society for Acute Medicine Clinical Quality Indicators coupled with the need for a more ‘intelligent’ way of tracking patients to replace the traditional white board and take sheet led to an in-house developed application which integrated with the diagnostic results, patient document system and eReferrals, was accessible from any hospital device, capturing status updates with live counters following clinical assessments, along with various patient and pathway specific warning indicators on a system which provided the clinical team with one version of real time ‘state of play’.”
“The team felt the new process was easy to use, enhanced patient safety whilst providing clinical care, helped them perform their roles, and was a better system than the traditional white board (evidenced by a survey of 33 members of staff).”
“This was further developed across 38 adult wards to meet the users’ need for a standardised nursing handover, RCP acute care toolkit compliant on-call handover for medical teams, board-rounds (based on NHS Improvement’s guidance on improving flow ) and pre-populated e-discharges.”
“An audit of 349 medical on-call handover tasks using e-handover (December’16 – February’17) found that 95.13% of patients handed over between on-call teams had a complete set of handover details compared to 3.23% in the previous paper based audit in 2014, using the RCP Toolkit handover standards.”
The technology has led to productivity gains of £95,000 per year by releasing staff time through these processes.
Dr Gurkaran Samra concluded: “Our journey of user led innovation through clinical: operational: health Informatics collaboration has created standardised practice and changed culture, through integrated and interoperable solutions, to improve patient safety and enhance organisational efficiency, whilst providing automated reporting and real time business intelligence.”
