RTLS Patient & Staff Tracking at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust

In this episode of the Patient Flow Podcast we sat down with Clare Nash, Clinical Programme Manager at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT).  RWT has been using RTLS as an enabling technology (integrated with TeleTracking’s Capacity Management Suite) to locate, in real-time, thousands of assets, hundreds of patients and more than 4,000 caregivers.  Their results after three years are quite astonishing:

• Awarded the Patient Safety and Care Award for their Safe Hands program
• Tracking the performance of more than 4,000 clinical staff
• Time to find a tagged asset is less than 25 seconds
• 75% of discharged patients leave their RTLS wrist badges in a drop box before leaving the hospital – automatically notifying housekeeping to clean the bed

Guest Bio:

Clare Nash, RGN, BSc Biomedical Sciences, is the clinical programme lead for the TeleTracking “SafeHands” initiative at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, West Midlands, UK.

This patient safety and centralised patient placement programme uses information from radio-frequency and infra-red hardware locating devices attached to patients, staff and assets to automate patient flows, real time bed management, alerts and alarms, tracks equipment, and staff and patient interactions.

Clare has worked on this innovative and world’s largest RTLS install for 5 years and believes the potential this system offers is unrivaled anywhere else.

Clare’s nursing background of more than 20 years in intensive and critical care nursing has ensured that patient care and safety was at the heart of designing the current systems. The patient is at the centre of the IT solution, ensuring maximum benefit for patients, and ease of use for staff.

The SafeHands team won the “Technology to Improve patient safety” category at the 2014 HSJ and Nursing Times patient safety awards, and Clare was awarded the Regional NHS Innovator of the year in 2014. The team, in collaboration with TeleTracking, have also won recognition from the International RFID journal and Building Better Healthcare Awards in 2015, and most recently cited in NHS White papers for their innovative solutions to tackle productivity and efficiency challenges.