North Staffordshire NHS Trust

One of the UK’s largest NHS hospitals has implemented “Touch Screen” technology from U-Touch to increase efficiency and improve patient care for a community of over half a million.

From brief to solution

A system was needed that no only logs the time a patient enters and leaves A&E but also captures full details of a patient’s movements during their time at the hospital. A manual whiteboard system had been implemented in an attempt to tackle the issue - but it proved awkward to use, limited in the information it displayed and there was no way to store information for management reporting or analysis (all records were removed as soon as the patient left A&E).

IM&T quickly identified the scope of the information that needed to be tracked and set about designing and developing a bespoke software application to capture and report details of patient movements. Input was taken from all hospital stakeholders with consultation meetings held to ensure that the final application and ‘Touch Screen’ platform met the hospital’s design brief whilst providing a stable, robust solution requiring minimum support and maintenance. The next challenge was how to make the solution easy to use for staff within the working environment whilst at the same time being robust and resilient enough to withstand the potential for abuse within a hectic A&E department. IM&T came up with the ideal solution - to use a large ‘Touch Screen’ overlay from U-Touch to convert the 40” LCD displays into interactive screens which enable staff to move patients from one cubicle or department, simply by touching the screen to select from a list of available options (e.g. patient location and new treatment status).