TECHNOLOGY
Basildon Trust cuts cardiac arrests by 75%
Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has reduced cardiac arrests by more than three quarters since it went live with an early warning system. The Trust is now redesigning clinical pathways using the same solution to spot potentially fatal conditions including acute kidney injury (AKI) and sepsis.
When Basildon and Thurrock University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust started to deploy Alcidion’s early warning solution, Patientrack, in April 2016, as part of its deteriorating patient programme, it had big ambitions to make a significant difference to patient safety and the working lives of nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals.
The impact the programme has achieved has been significant – from a major reduction in cardiac arrests, through to hours of time saved for nurses every day. The project is empowering nurses to call for help sooner when patients need it, and it has also meant that the Mid and South Essex University Hospital group has now created
its first chief nursing information officer, Sam Neville, who holds the responsibility for embedding digital technology, innovation and forward thinking throughout the Trust’s clinical services. “The outcomes of this project have shown nurses just what they can do with technology, with nurses now influencing and delivering digital leadership,” said Neville.
Going digital with observations With rapid impact already seen in other hospitals from the use of Patientrack, the Trust’s team was keen to deploy quickly. This started by replacing paper charts traditionally used to capture bedside observations with iPads, so that nurses could digitally
record their patients’ vital signs directly into Patientrack.
Electronic observations functionality was rolled out in nine months to all inpatient wards. This has meant that nurses no longer need to manually write down measurements of key physiological parameters and that they no longer need to manually calculate the national early warning score, otherwise known as NEWS2, a crucial indicator of whether a patient’s condition is deteriorating. Patientrack performs the calculation automatically. This has helped to improve the accuracy of observations. A further integration is also starting to
allow Patientrack to take readings directly from the Trust’s Welch Allyn monitors – used by nurses to capture several observations, including blood pressure. This is reducing the need to manually enter readings into a mobile device, and the associated risk of data entry error. Dawn Patience, the Trust’s director of nursing, commented that the use of Patientrack is having a big impact on releasing nurses’ time. A baseline audit with electronic observations and paper revealed that the time taken to complete a set of observations reduced from two minutes and 30 seconds to just one minute and 30 seconds after going digital. “That’s a minute saved per set of
Patientrack is helping to release nurses’ time. AUGUST 2020
observations, per patient,” she commented. “A nurse saves 28 minutes per round, four rounds per day.” As many as 13 hours of time are now saved for a nurse in a single week. “This means staff can spend more time with the patient,” said Patience. “It is helping us to improve the quality of care.” The introduction of Patientrack has also had a big impact on patient outcomes. “Cardiac arrests went from 2.20 per thousand admissions to 1.26 in October 2016, and now we are as low as 0.46,”
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