Symphony ED plays across Manchester

Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has gone live with a new emergency department system in all of its hospitals.

The trust has announced that it has successfully launched Ascribe’s Symphony emergency department system at the University Dental Hospital of Manchester.

The department had been running an earlier Ascribe system. It has also begun using the company’s medical indexing and document access system (MIDAs), so staff can electronically scan patient case notes directly into the Ascribe database – reducing the reliance on paper records.

The dental hospital’s information and development manager, Jackie Kitchen, said the go-live was undertaken without any significant problems.

“The go live day went very smoothly with only a few teething problems which were soon sorted. Overall, it has been received very well by the staff in the department.

“We now have a paper light system which has significantly reduced the time spent registering patients. We are now able to monitor patients throughout the dental casualty and prevent patients waiting longer than necessary.”

The dental hospital is the last of the trust’s five hospitals to go live with the new system. All of the hospitals are supported by the same Ascribe Symphony database.

Nursing staff are rotated around different emergency departments, so the new, integrated system is enabling the trust to improve continuity of service.

Kitchen said the additional use of the document management system was further enhancing efficiency within the department.

Ascribe’s chief executive, Stephen Critchlow, said the company was delighted with the series of successful go-lives and that the trust was now benefiting from “a truly integrated emergency department solution.”