East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust has deployed Nervecentre’s digital care plans at Lister Hospital.
The full roll out of the plans follows a pilot earlier this summer in two wards at Lister, a 566-bed general and acute district hospital in Stevenage.
It is part of the trust’s wider Keeping our Patients Safe (KOPS) programme that focuses on improving clinical decision making by replacing paper processes with digital tools.
Nervecnetre’s digital care plans have now been fully deployed across all adult inpatient wards at Lister.
The hospital was already using the company for electronic recording of observations, National Early Warning Score 2 escalations, acute kidney injury alerts, fluid balance and in its emergency department.
It is now looking to introduce direct access to patients’ primary care records for clinicians.
Lister’s nurses are now digitally recording assessments and care plans in Nervecentre including nurse administered propofol sedations, harm-free care assessments and harm-free care plans.
Increased visibility
Before the introduction of KOPS, nurses were handwriting their assessments and care plans. The information is now visible to the clinical and operational teams as soon as it is known as an integrated part of real time electronic patient records.
Ward manager Cecile Gascon said: “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.”
The pilot included the deployment of a digital nursing assessment proforma (NAP) which, upon review, identified a dramatic saving in nursing time. Nervecentre said a paper NAP takes 45 minutes to complete on average, whereas digital NAPs take just 9.6 minutes.
