Leicestershire Community Hospitals deploy e-observations and handover to keep patients safer

Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust are now using Nervecentre Electronic Observations, Handover and Clinical Assessments on mobile devices designed to keep patients safer at 8 of their community hospitals.

The community hospitals clinical staff have been provided with mobile devices to record electronic observations including automated escalations to clinicians for patients with a high EWS score and the Nervecentre Handover solution; which is a big step in improving clinical staff communications and ultimately patient safety.

Having successfully been awarded funding from the NHS England Nursing Technology Fund, the mobile Nervecentre solution was recently introduced at Coalville Hospital and is now being rapidly rolled out to all other inpatient medical wards in Hinckley, Leicester City, Loughborough, Lutterworth, Market Harborough, Melton and Oakham Community Hospitals.

Jude Smith, Head of Nursing for LPT’s Community Health Services explains: “This project has allowed us to accelerate the implementation of our digital strategy by giving the community hospital ward nurses the ability to enter vital signs data electronically and risk assessments by using mobile devices. It is well documented that to continue with paper based processes is not an option and that by reducing this there will be significant improvements in patient care and outcomes. The patient observations collected will then be robustly subjected to a set of clinically set parameters which will act as a safety net and patients will be escalated to the medical team according to their clinical priorities”.

Jude Smith continues “In addition the electronic patient data collected will provide ‘real time’ nursing dashboards which will allow us to identify patient acuity across the 8 community hospitals and deploy staff accordingly to ensure safer staffing levels.”

The next step to this innovative project with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and Nervecentre Software is to integrate the patient observations and handover records with patient information already collated at Leicester’s three acute hospitals, where they already use Nervecentre solutions, to improve on the patients journey from acute hospital to the community hospitals to be able to share valuable patient history records.