Traditionally, the patient experience within the NHS has been a secondary consideration to the requirements for effective and safe treatment. However, since the coalition Government made a commitment to improving patient experience and putting patients at the heart of everything the NHS does, the patient experience has moved up the agenda of many healthcare leaders and is no longer considered to be a luxury.
Demonstrating the importance being placed on the patient experience, the Department of Health 2010 health whitepaper ‘Equity and excellence: liberating the NHS,’1 outlines plans to make patient experience a measurable outcome of care. The 2010 NHS Confederation report ‘Feeling better? Improving patient experience in hospital2 offers evidence to show that organisations with a strong emphasis on providing a high-quality patient experience have found that it is linked to better health outcomes. Further, Cole-King and Harding3 and Weinman et al4 offer good evidence to show that when a patient feels less stressed, recovery time is significantly decreased. Ensuring that patients are happy, comfortable and stress-free can, therefore, offer benefits to the patient, the Trust and the NHS as a whole.
Physical comfort
In October 2011 the NHS National Quality Board (NQB) agreed on a working definition of patient experience to guide its measurement across the NHS. This framework outlines elements considered to be critical to the patients’ experience of NHS services5. One of the areas highlighted in the document is ‘physical comfort’. It states that, in addition to ensuring clinical comfort, patients should have access to help with activities of daily living and should be cared for in clean and comfortable surroundings.
Creating a good physical environment for patients is a challenge for the NHS, with its wide variety of building styles and ages. However, it is important to recognise that even small changes can have a positive effect for both patients and staff. Technology can play a big role here and many NHS Trusts are now looking to technology to offer a solution to help optimise the patient experience.
Nurse call systems, for example, have long been a vital part of any healthcare facility. As technology has advanced, nurse call and communication systems are now able to do much more than just allowing patients to alert staff that they need something. They have been transformed
into Trust-wide integrated problem-solving tools, without compromising their basic patient-care functionality.
Today’s nurse call systems need to be able to offer a high level of integration with the patient environment, working together with third-party hardware and software systems to give patients a high degree of control over their immediate environment – this could, for example, include having the ability to adjust room temperature, open or close blinds or curtains, interact with an entertainment system or to adjust the room lighting or bed position to suit their individual and changing needs.
Giving patients the ability to adjust their own environment also frees nurses from the need to respond to the many non-clinical patient calls they are currently required to answer. This allows them to spend more time addressing the clinical needs of their patients. Giving the patient more independence also has the effect of raising their self-esteem, relieving stress and making them feel more comfortable.
Adaptability
Rapidly advancing communication technologies make it vital that the nurse call system is adaptable. It is, therefore, important to consider installing a system that uses the latest technology and one that employs open communication standards so the system is able to integrate with new systems that may be developed in the future. A fully IP nurse call system meets these requirements perfectly, having the ability to integrate with other systems over a unified IP-network.
“IP (Internet protocol) is, basically, a communication transport protocol that enables the transport of data packets across an Ethernet network,” explained Terry Boarer, iPiN technical manager at The Wandsworth Group. “In a hospital environment, each ward is, effectively, a small network. Other wards or departments can be easily added and they can be wired together to build up to a larger Local Area Network (LAN) which can then be centrally administered, offering the estates department a centralised reporting and maintenance solution.”
Such a future-proofed solution allows Trusts to protect their original technology investment, while allowing them to add new IP-based solutions to the network. This helps Trusts to keep their patients at the centre of care in a cost-effective manner, ensuring that patients are cared for in comfortable surroundings and that Trusts can ensure they are able to meet the ever-changing care standards and guidelines.
The Wandsworth Group has recently lent its support to The Nurse Call Charter (www.nursecallcharter.com) which offers advice, recommendations and food-for-thought on some of the main issues to consider today when specifying a nurse call system. Not only do today’s buyers and specifers need to ensure any system is HTM 08-03 compliant but also understand just what nurse call systems can now achieve to help the NHS deliver outstanding patient care.
References
1. Department of Health (2010) Equity and excellence: liberating the NHS
2. NHS Confederation (2011). Feeling better? Improving patient experience in hospital. http://www.nhsconfed.org/publications/reports/pages/feeling-better-improving-patient-experience-in-hospital.aspx
3. Cole-King A, Harding KG. Psychological factors and delayed healing in chronic wounds. Psychosom Med. 2001 Mar-Apr;63(2):216-20.
4. Weinman J, Ebrecht M, Scott S, Walburn J, Dyson M. Enhanced wound healing after emotional disclosure intervention. Br J Health Psychol. 2008 Feb;13(Pt 1):95-102.
5. NHS Quality Board (2011) NHS Patient Experience Framework. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nhs-patient-experience-framework (accessed 2 September 2014)
