Healthcare facilities looking to‘future-proof’

While a bedhead-based nurse call system’s original function – to enable the patient to contact nursing staff promptly – remains key to this day, the increasing sophistication of Internet Protocol (IP) technology, and the ability to connect nurse call equipment to a variety of mobile devices, now allow the incorporation of many other features, improving the patient experience, ensuring a quicker response from nursing/clinical staff, and enabling hospital managers to monitor, record, and scrutinise, the care being provided. As HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, discovered on a visit to the Woking headquarters of one of the leading nurse call system specialists, the Wandsworth Group, the only real limiting factor in such systems’ further development is the willingness of healthcare staff more used to ‘traditional’ equipment to embrace the latest technology and its benefits.

Behind the ever-increasing functionality and capabilities of Wandsworth Group’s nurse call and associated communications components today – as has indeed been the case since the company was first established in Birmingham in 1904 as an electrical wiring manufacturer – is considerable engineering expertise. It was therefore appropriate that much of my time during my visit to Wandsworth’s modern-day headquarters in Albert Drive, Woking – it re-located there from another nearby site in early 2013 – was spent with Terry Boarer, the company’s IPiN system technical specialist. An expert in both computer hardware and software design, who has been with Wandsworth for the past 13 years, it was he who originally conceived Wandsworth’s now extremely well-established ‘fully IP’ nurse call system, IPiN, which the company has successfully sold both across the UK, and in territories including Denmark and the Middle East, for the past eight years, and of which the latest incarnation, IPiN Evolution, was launched earlier this year.

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