Bedford Hospital uses PDAs to track repair jobs

Facilities and Estates maintenance staff at Bedford Hospital NHS Trust are using PDAs to receive and clear job dockets for repairs and maintenance.

The system, provided by TAAP together with Mindworks, takes information from the department’s helpdesk system and sends out job dockets over a Vodafone mobile GPRS network.

Staff previously worked with paper dockets printed from the helpdesk system, but these were not always returned, meaning the trust was unable to keep track of jobs’ status.

The trust’s repairs manager, Peter Hurst, told E-Health Insider: “We used to have a back office helpdesk system enabling customers to report faults over the intranet, which would create dockets for us. We would print these out each day and the tradesmen would go to the job and complete the form. We found that there were backlogs and workers had not always completed their dockets because they hadn’t returned it and completed the paperwork – so we wanted to find an electronic way of assigning and completing jobs quicker.”

The trust chose the TAAP system for its ability to integrate existing paperwork into electronic forms, and issued PDAs to all 26 of its maintenance staff.

Using the device, the maintenance staff are sent information on the job detail, location and contact. Each tradesman books a job on his PDA and carries out the repair.

Once the job has been completed, the tradesman attains a satisfaction rating and digital signature to sign off the work.

Hurst said: “The new system makes our work a lot easier and the tradesman have taken to the new PDAs like ducks to water. Using the PDA, we can clear jobs from the helpdesk a lot quicker and we can see a series of savings. We have no more paperwork to be filled now, the system is more efficient as we no longer have to travel back and forth to collect dockets and jobs are allocated based on our locations.”

As well as the main Bedford hospital site, the staff also work across numerous sites in the Bedfordshire region, so it was important for the trust to be able to work in real-time, reducing any unnecessary travel.

Hurst added: “The new PDA system allows us to see real-time progression of our workload, allocating new jobs is now a simple process of looking at our PC to see who is available and sending the job to the tradesman’s PDA.”

He said the PDA system had helped eliminate misplaced or lost paperwork. Staff were trained on the new system over a three-day period.

Hurst said: “The Repairs and Maintenance department is key to keeping any hospital operational and the PDA system allows us to work more efficiently and raise satisfaction levels, whilst reducing costs.”

If the tradesman forgets to record any required information, validation controls built into the PDA remind them to record the missing information, ensuring defined processes are accurately followed and provided to a consistent standard.

When all required information on the electronic docket is recorded, the user simply presses a send button and within seconds the back office system is updated, supplying their manager with a real-time view on progression of the daily workload.

The end of day reconciliation is eliminated and time sheets are automated from the booking times on the PDA. Administrative staff no longer need to key information from dockets and time sheets into the system.

TAAP sales director, Paul George, told EHI: “This system has helped to cut out unnecessary time spent on administration in the past and provided Bedford with a system designed especially for facilities and estate management.”

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Joe Fernandez