Trust uses IT to help manage ‘superbugs’

IT which reduces infection control alert times from six hours to six seconds is being deployed to help in the battle against ‘superbugs’ at Wigan, Wrightington and Leigh NHS Trust in North-west England.

A real-time bed management system, which is due to start as a live pilot at the end of May 2008, lies at the heart of the trust’s new infection control weapon against bugs such as Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Clostridium difficile.

Cambio’s Cosmic Platform provides the patient administration system (PAS) underpinning the development and ‘layers’ of information are added about the status of the bed and the infection control status of the patients.

Information is displayed through the front end of the hospital’s system, provided by Orion Concerto, giving nurses fast access to information about whether a bed is occupied and whether the patient occupying it has an infection.

Director of nursing, Gill Harris, demonstrated the system which provides plans of wards with beds occupied by infected patients clearly marked in red.

“It won’t allow bed managers to put new patients into an area with a known or suspect infection,” she explained to an industry round table discussion last week.

The same processes can be carried out using paper and phone calls, Harris said, but that approach was much slower. The computerised process had reduced the time for pinpointing an infection “from six hours to six seconds”.

Computerised bed management also makes it easier for bed managers and nurses to organise occupancy of side wards. These rooms, offering single occupancy, are always in high demand for various reasons, including infection control.

“All my side wards were permanently full and I never knew who I could move,” Harris explained. Now the system provides her and other managers with information to support decisions that can be hard to make.

Other areas of the hospital, such as the X-ray department, can also see the infection status of a patient and take appropriate action.

Harris is optimistic that the system could also be used for other alerts to show nurses when, for example, patients need nutritional support or are at particular risk of falling, but she is concentrating on infection control for the time being.

“This is a big change for bed managers. We also need to get the nurses to put the patient [details] onto the PAS immediately rather then when the ward clerk arrives the next day,” she said, adding that the staff involved had been “absolutely brilliant.”

“We haven’t gone out and hand-picked staff who are IT-friendly. We went to people who had knowledge in their heads.”

The new approach represents an interesting shift in IT terms, too. Cambio’s UK manager Andrew Meiner said: “IT systems have mostly been used for recording information – this is providing real-time information.”

The system will be evaluated over the next three months.

Reducing hospital infections remains one of the government’s key targets and a source of concern for patients. Introducing the discussion of the Wrightington Wigan and Leigh initiative, senior healthcare IT analyst at Ovum, Tola Sargeant, pointed out that three times as many people die from hospital acquired infections as are killed on the road in the UK.

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Cambio

Wrightington Wigan and Leigh NHS Trust