Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has implemented System C’s CareFlow Connect app to perform electronic handovers of care.
It has been integrated with the trust’s CareFlow electronic patient record to provide staff with a patient’s full information on mobile devices, complete with notes that are dynamically updated in real time by multi-professional teams and date/time stamped to create an audit trail.
Barnsley Hospital has deployed the app around its ward over recent months, the latest areas to go live being the acute response team, two surgical wards and same day emergency care (medical and surgical). It reported that nearly 30,000 handovers were completed in November.
Connect’s digital workflow supports a multi-disciplinary approach to handovers, and as the patient moves between departments their key information moves with them.
The trust’s chief clinical information officer and consultant gastroenterologist, Dr Dominic Bullas, said: “The maternity department went live in June, and the midwives have fully embraced it. We’re now working on rolling out the system beyond the hospital to our community midwives and introducing further trust-wide functionality with alerting, task management and communications.”
There also plans to use the app to manage internal referrals, run a pilot with speech and language therapists, and to use it from next year for tissue viability.
Nurses will be able to use the patient-identified messaging and photo sharing features to take wound photos at the bedside and ask for expert follow-up advice electronically from the team.
Staff at the hospital have previously had to print handover documents that were created using Word and stored on a shared drive.
Image from iStock, Dragon Images
