Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) has become the first organisation in the UK to deploy Altera Digital Health’s patient flow solution.
The system went live in March at the trust’s Royal Albert Edward Infirmary, which provides a base for emergency and acute services.
Ward staff, along with the bed management, portering, domestic, and infection prevention and control teams are using the system either directly or via integration with the trust’s existing Altera Sunrise electronic patient record system.
Altera said that Patient Flow is providing visibility of capacity with real time data on bed status, bed availability and patient movement across the whole hospital. This should enable the hospital to take a proactive approach to manage emergency and elective patient flow.
Positive feedback
Pam Green, deputy director for clinical informatics and chief nursing information officer at WWL, said: “We’ve had some very positive feedback from staff in terms of usability and accessibility and releasing time to reinvest back into patient care.”
The system has made it possible to track portering and domestic workflows with iPads instead of paper, and the portering team’s radios have been replaced by iPhones to manage requests and worklists via an app.
Kevin Parker-Evans, chief nursing officer at WWL, said: “Throughout my career bed management has always been a paper collation exercise, but paper is never live. By the time you’ve finished gathering the information it will have changed.
“That’s why the bed managers particularly like the bed board in the system. They can access a real time glance of every bed on site, which shows whether a bed is occupied/vacant, along with the cleaning status.”
