21ST-CENTURY TECHNOLOGY


At The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, sensors to manage bed occupancy and staff flows create a ‘virtual wall’ around the particular bed location. With staff and patients wearing readable badges, the sensors register who enters and leaves the space, ‘supporting staff with patient safety and quality by providing real-time alerts and alarms’.”


NHSI-supported initiative Since Spring 2015, the three large English acute Trusts have partnered with TeleTracking Technologies to implement Hospital Coordination Centres underpinned by the company’s Operational Platform. The technology involves the implementation of an Operational Platform and patient flow solutions with varying components of the RTLS technology to support auto- discharge, patient status, and equipment location and availability. The RTLS is used to monitor and drive activities such as showing staff in real time where the greatest needs are, and automating bed cleans as soon as they are identified as available. The solution also ‘provides real-time data to support proactive decisions and processes’.


Extensive US deployment While TeleTracking’s solutions work in over 900 US hospitals, the first UK Trust to pilot the patient flow and Operational Platform was The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, which was ‘flagged’ for its efforts in Lord Carter’s Final Report. Key benefits include operational efficiencies delivered through automated workflows, clinical staff spending less time on administrative tasks, and ‘more timely care across the organisation’. The technology’s use also helped the Trust reduce its A&E target breaches by a factor of four once it ‘went live’ with the centralised patient placement models, and cut the number of operations cancelled due to bed unavailability.


Inaugural Lord Carter Award The Wolverhampton Trust’s deployment of the technology won it the inaugural Lord Carter Innovation Award at Hospital Innovations 2017 in London. In an article in the June 2017 HEJ, the Trust confirmed that, following the success of its SafeHands programme focusing on hand hygiene, it had integrated the technology’s RTLS features with the activities of the capacity management team at its New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton. The Trust had begun implementing the Coordination Centre technology in Spring 2015, and had since equipped all of its 4,000 employees, all inpatients, and 1,500 assets – including 800 beds – with ‘sensor badges’, co-ordinated by a Capacity Team within its Centralised Patient Placement and


34 Health Estate Journal June 2018 ‘‘


While TeleTracking’s solutions work in over 900 US hospitals, the first UK Trust to pilot the patient flow and Operational Platform was The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust


Coordination Centre. Among other benefits had been the ability to reduce bed changeover times to under 35 minutes, to locate a tagged asset (‘typically’) in just 20 seconds, compared with 60 minutes previously, a 10.8 per cent reduction in stay length, only two winter pressure beds opened since 2015, and 126 hours of freed up latent capacity by turning beds around more effectively.


Countess of Chester adoption Last autumn the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust joined The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust as a national pilot, and its Model Hospital programme is partnering with TeleTracking to implement its Coordination Centre and Operational Platform. The Trust will install over 4,000 infrared sensors above hospital beds and doorways that read from small tracking devices on patients, staff, and equipment. The data produced by these sensors provides real-time information for live ward electronic bed boards and a centralised Care Coordination Centre that supports staff in getting patients to the right beds, the first time, more efficiently. TeleTracking Technologies said: “The Countess of Chester’s Model Hospital Programme is the Trust’s Transformation and Efficiency Programme based on Lord Carter’s recommendations. Through its Hospital Coordination Centre the Trust is placing a greater emphasis on using real- time data to proactively inform decision


making to best benefit patients and staff. Deployment of Coordination Centre and real-time solutions is a flagship programme for it in altering its approach to patient flow, and providing more efficient, higher quality care by increasing the responsiveness of its workforce. “Having witnessed the benefits delivered by TeleTracking’s technology, the Trust understands that if it can reduce stay length for each patient by a few hours, it will provide an extra 20 beds a day, delivering much-needed capacity through more efficient working practices, instead of additional spending. The Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust continues to share progress and benefits from its deployment of these systems with the National Working Group established by NHS Improvement, so that other Trusts looking to procure real-time healthcare and patient flow systems can benefit from best practices and economies of scale. Since ‘go-live’, the Trust’s bed turnaround team has released an average of 156 hours per week back to nursing staff. The period from a patient being discharged, to their hospital bed being ready for a new patient, has been reduced from over four hours to under two and half.”


Another Trust to have partnered with TeleTracking is the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which went live with its Coordination Centre in December 2017.


TeleTracking Technologies says hospital Coordination Centres (like the Carilion Clinic Coordination Centre in Roanoake, Virginia, pictured here) use a model ‘similar to that of an air traffic control centre’ that delivers real-time information ‘on virtually every care support need within a hospital and/or region’.


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