HEALTHCARE LIGHTING
Integrating nurse call and lighting systems
Integrating nurse call with lighting in the patient environment can have significant benefits for patient safety, wellbeing, and workflow efficiency. Matt Clutton, Mechanical Product Design manager at Static Systems Group, a specialist provider of healthcare communication and bedhead services trunking solutions, explores the latest developments in this field, and discusses the role of lighting in hospital wards.
Static Systems has been integrating lighting solutions with nurse call systems for over 40 years. Historically, lighting in a healthcare environment held three primary functions – enabling staff to get to a patient call as quickly as possible by guiding them using corridor and overdoor lights; lighting the bed area for patient convenience and comfort, and providing lighting at the bedside, controlled by clinicians for examination purposes. Over the last 10 years or so, we have witnessed rapid developments in lighting technology, and there are now various lighting control solutions on the market which allow nurse call systems to control luminaires. These include protocols such as SwitchDim, DSI (Digital Serial Interface), and DALI (Digital Addressable Lighting Interface)-connected solutions, as well as PoE (Power over Ethernet) and IP (Internet Protocol) connectivity. Static Systems works with a number of lighting suppliers, including Whitecroft Lighting, Brandon Medical, Glamox Luxo Lighting, Thorlux Lighting, and Visualite, among others, to varying levels of control and with different products.
How integration works
Nurse call and lighting integration can range from providing basic on/off/dim functionality for overbed lighting, and ‘Anglepoise’ lamps provided for patient comfort, through to comprehensive scene selection options, automatically activated in support of patient safety and enhanced workflow. A popular method of control uses intelligent DALI switch monitors. This enables the switches and bed light relays on the nurse call and bedhead trunking to send commands to the DALI- connected lighting provided by others. Often, for patient convenience, control of the lighting is provided through buttons on the nurse call patient handset. An established example of lighting and nurse call integration involves the following: Scene 1, press the bed light button on the patient hand unit once to bring all the lights on.
Visualite panel drivers are integrated to Static Systems’ nurse call system using intelligent DALI protocol, which allows ‘smooth and seamless dimming control’ of the Visualite lighting system above the patient bed.
Scene 2, press the bed light button again to reduce lighting to 50%.
Scene 3, press the bed light button again and hold to turn light brightness up/down.
Scene 4, press the bed light button yet again to turn the lights off.
Although Static Systems is best known in the healthcare sector for providing nurse
call and bedhead trunking solutions, we also manufacture our own lighting range – which includes both T5 fluorescent and LED technologies. T5 lighting is slowly being phased out in favour of LED, as LED offers a range of colour options, lower energy consumption, and significantly lower maintenance requirements, due to the extended life of the technology.
Fully compliant
Whitecroft Lighting’s new Florence+ bedhead luminaire can be set to many different scenes to suit both staff and patient needs (see the following pages).
As is the case for all suppliers of lighting in the healthcare sector, our lighting solutions are designed to be fully compliant with CIBSE’s guide to hospital lighting design, LG02 Lighting Guide 02: Hospitals & Health Care Buildings-LG2. The guide defines the amount of light (lux) required in different areas of hospitals – from public areas and general operating environments, to specialised areas and wards. It even goes as far as to define the levels of light required on a patient’s pillow, and the characteristics of the light source, such as colour rendering, which is important for patient monitoring by staff, and the degree of glare to patients from luminaires.
August 2019 Health Estate Journal 49
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