Brighton does bed management

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust’s electronic bed management system has reduced the time taken to log patient transfers and discharges from three days to around eight minutes.

The trust worked with Stone Group to deploy the system, which involved around 70 Samsung Large Format Display monitors with touch screens across all inpatient wards in its six hospitals.

The monitors allow teams to easily view the real-time bed state on their ward and manage the flow of patients.

Staff use a traffic light coding system that allows staff coming onto the ward to see which patient requires their assessment and where they can be found. This information can also be accessed remotely on a desktop by staff such as physiotherapists while on another ward or in their own department.

The trust previously operated two systems for patient management: a handwritten dry-wipe board and an electronic desktop programme.

Brighton said these were difficult to keep updated in real-time and took time to keep aligned with one another, causing delays to patient discharge and progression throughout the hospitals.

Since introducing the new bed management system, the time between when a patient physically moves and when this is entered on a system has been reduced from an average of three days to 7-9 minutes.

Niki Porter, operational service manager, clinical administration, at Brighton and Sussex said: “We needed to increase visibility of patient information and ensure the same information was visible on every desktop throughout the trust in order to increase efficiencies in each ward and make decision-making easier and quicker.”

The installation was completed in three weeks, broken up by a week for staff training.

The system is used by nurses on a daily basis as well as doctors and multi-disciplinary teams including physiotherapists, dieticians, occupational health therapists and social workers.