SECURITY & WELFARE
Keep A Close Eye
Care facilities are duty bound to keep patients and staff safe and secure at all times. Dominic List, Chairman of Comtact Healthcare, explains how the latest Wi-Fi technologies can help to strengthen security.
St Andrew’s Healthcare offers specialist mental health, learning disability, autism and brain injury medical services. The organisation has tripled in size since the late 90s and now has some 4,000 staff and patients located across four sites.
The security and welfare of these people is a primary concern and recently led to the deployment of a secure wireless network across the estate. The charity now uses solutions from Comtact Healthcare to gather real-time updates on the use of medical records and equipment, as well as the whereabouts of staff and patients, across the hospital campus.
How Does It Work? Real-time location system (RTLS) technology provides two-way communication and tracking to an accuracy of one metre. As soon as a staff alarm is triggered, the response team can pinpoint precisely where the alert originated and quickly respond.
Often, hospital environments rely on a variety of processes and systems in order to respond to staff or patient incidents. Usually these involve an emergency broadcast, where all staff are alerted, rather than only the most relevant team. Plus, the employee who raised the alarm still needs to be located within the hospital grounds. RTLS eradicates these inconsistencies,
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standardises processes and drives out inefficiencies.
Fewer False Alarms As well as improving patient and personnel safety, the new technology has reduced the number of ‘false alarms’ by a factor of ten. With the tracking function now extended to medical equipment, St Andrew’s Healthcare is also realising further return on their original project investment as there are no additional infrastructure costs. Staff morale and wellbeing have also been improved, as frustrations around searching for equipment have been alleviated.
CCTV On The Move Thanks to live camera feeds being sent to tablet devices, St Andrew’s Healthcare’s security teams can now go out on patrol without losing contact with the security operations centre. The organisation uses IP CCTV to help with security, again taking advantage of the new Wi-Fi network. All collected footage is stored on central servers for increased security.
By running advanced analytics and exception reporting against the recordings, St Andrew’s can use CCTV to track behavioural and footfall patterns around their campuses. This provides much higher levels of patient and staff privacy without compromising safety. The future potential of this
function is also important, as it could be tied into other systems such as access/door control, fire panels and IP telephony systems.
Next Generation Care For St Andrew’s Healthcare the main result of working with Comtact Healthcare has been the deployment of an advanced wireless application delivery network. The solution provides both indoor and outdoor locations services, advanced security, “always on” voice communication, bedside patient observation and remote worker monitoring.
Operational benefits have included improved bedside care through placing information directly at the clinician’s fingertips, accurate data capture at the point of care, supported drug management and management of patient’s vital statistics, which contribute to the care path. In addition, the technology has improved both the safety of staff and the level of productivity.
The good news is that this kind of approach is easily replicable, and will allow other organisations in the sector to reap the rewards that technology has to offer.
www.comtacthealthcare.com
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