Staff driving forward an Analytical Command Centre at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT) scooped the ‘Delivering for Front Line Staff’ award at last week’s Health Tech Newspaper awards.
The command centre – a series of screens based at the Royal Lancaster Infirmary site – shows live information about a patient before they enter the Trust’s hospitals, during their stay and when they are discharged home.
It is part of a different set of activities that have been implemented in the emergency setting to help staff to improve patient management, care and experience.
Benefits of the command centre include:
- Showing which patients are due for discharge and themes of why there may be delays
- Highlighting the performance in the Emergency Departments (ED) which allows staff to see the status of ambulances, the number of walk-ins and if there has been a surge in patients
- Showing the number of admissions to hospital through outpatient appointments and departments such as the Ambulatory Care Unit
- Highlighting the current bed state across the Trust which helps teams to manage the demand for beds across the hospital and ease the number of patients in ED.
Rob O’Neill, Head of Information at UHMBT, said: “It’s fantastic that the Trust has been recognised through this award, and particularly as it highlights our commitment to utilise analytics to support the delivery of safe care of our patients. We’re building upon the platform we have to expand command centre capability to also support elective and out-of-hospital services.”
The Trust holds patient flow meetings every two hours in the Analytical Command Centre which helps teams to better analyse the emergency care setting and patient flow in and out of the hospital.
The command centre has been designed to work in a similar way to airport Air Traffic Control and displays live and predictive information about patients throughout their hospital stay, from incoming patients travelling via ambulance to patients waiting for discharge home.
You can find out more about the HTN award here https://www.thehtn.co.uk/2020/01/27/htn-people-and-partnership-awards-2020-meet-the-winners/