The digital transformation continues with Hospital at Night

A new system that ensures patient safety through the efficient coordination of medical tasks across wards at night-time has successfully launched at University Hospitals Plymouth (UHP).

Nervecentre’s Hospital at Night, which launched on Monday 02 August, is the centralised mobile digital platform that provides the means to prioritise and monitor patient care across the night shift from 20:00 until 08:00.

The software ensures ward requests are electronically sent to the Acute Care Team coordinators who assign tasks to medical colleagues with a single click. The software contains real-time information enabling an overview of which doctors are available, where they are, and their current workloads.

“The system is well designed and easy to use,” said Dr Marc Bertagne. “The combination of receiving audible alerts upon the allocation of a task with the ability to instantly message colleagues regarding patient care, enables the junior doctors to work efficiently during out of hours operations.”

And it is patient care that sits at the very centre of this rollout, keenly stressed by Deputy Medical Director, Paul McArdle: “Hospital at Night provides information that ultimately means significant benefits in both efficiencies and safety for our patients and for our staff.”

The new system was implemented without a hitch, and involved months of planning and testing from many teams across the Trust.

“The professionalism of the teams involved throughout this programme of work has been exemplary,” added Paul. “It is made even more impressive with the operational pressures we are currently facing. I am always proud of the work of our teams here in the Trust, but when projects of this magnitude are implemented into the organisation, it makes me feel incredibly proud to see the work of so many come together for the benefit of our patients and help our colleagues workloads more manageable.”

The Trust has also introduced Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA) across clinical areas and now with Hospital at Night coming into play, it paves the way for the further transformation that will help digitalise patient care – in an overarching project named Digital Care. The next phase in Digital Care is to replace the current ED management system with another Nervecentre solution which will include the ability to take electronic observations and improve sepsis pathways.