St. Helens and Whiston hospital recently automated its bed management. The IMS MAXIMS real-time system recently went live at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Officials say has simplified the handling of more than 500 patient admissions, discharges and transfers a day.
The trust provides a full range of acute in-patient, out-patient, day case and emergency services to St Helens, Knowsley, parts of Halton and Liverpool, extending to the whole of Cheshire, Merseyside, North Wales and the Isle of Man with the Regional Plastic Surgery and Burns Unit. St Helens Hospital opened in 2008 and the Whiston Hospital in March 2010. The new bed management system was introduced as part of a wider inititative to further enhance patient services, hospital officials said.
Key features of the system, which is integrated with the IMS MAXIMS PAS are:
- The Ward View – shows the layout of each ward with essential details like color coding indicating whether the bed is available or occupied, patient name and planned discharge time.
- The White Board View – large panel display for viewing only.
- The Bed Management View – details a wide range of information including total hospital bed capacity and availability, patients due for discharge and elective booking lists
The IMS MAXIMS solution is web-browser based and was deployed in order to hand more control to nurses. Hospital officials said the previous system demanded lots of telephone calls between clerical staff and nurses, plus frequent head counts of patients.
“We previously had a retrospective, clerical based system that was labour intensive and time consuming,” said Neil Darvill, director of informatics at St. Helens. “The new system shifts control towards the nurses on each ward and works in real time, so it eliminates the delays and frees up time. We are now able to plan discharges better and get people home a little sooner.”
