A Day in the Life of WardView in NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde
What are you?
I’m commonly known as an electronic whiteboard, after my marker pen predecessor. Think
of a single picture of a ward’s patients, made up of certain key information about them.
Here’s a selfie I did of me in a WIG ward recently, minus the left hand columns with patient
names etc...
Most obviously this display is on a large TV-type screen attached to a wall in the staff area of
the ward, but it works on PCs and mobile tablets as well. But it’s not just a display – users
can do things by tapping or typing too.
How are you able to talk to an interviewer?
Well I can’t, of course, so my users Fiona1, Morven2 and Ruth3 are speaking for me.
What are you for?
With the huge pressure on beds it’s a real challenge managing the workflow around our inpatients. I offer facilities to help make all the actions around discharge planning slicker and
safer. Maybe I should be called WardDo instead of WardView!
How do you do that?
By taking the patient data in Trakcare and displaying it in an at-a-glance way. Has transport
been arranged? What stage is the take-home medication at? And if you’re a bed manager,
say, interested in estimated dates of discharge then a tap on my screen orders all the
patients from soonest date upwards. But for whatever use the visual aspect is always
important, with consistent colours and shapes to denote different things. You’ll see that on
the picture above.
1
Fiona Bernklow, Senior Bed Manager
Morven McElroy, Consultant Geriatrician
3 Ruth Forrest, Lead Clinical Pharmacist
2
What do your users think of you?
That depends on who you ask, I think. Everyone seems to like how quick I am to learn and
easy to use. As for how useful I am, I’ve noticed that the users who are outside the ward are
the most positive ones. Pharmacists, for example, find me really useful, and bed managers
see the benefit. Ward staff vary in how much they use me and find me useful, perhaps
because they’re on the spot and know what’s going on anyway. But the ‘outsiders’ depend
on them to keep my information up to date, so I’m hoping that there will be new features in
the future which will encourage ward staff even more by being helpful to them.
Why are pharmacists enthusiastic?
I think the fact that the system saves them time each day has a lot to do with it. It’s a lot to
do with facilitating changes to the way pharmacists work. So for example they have to
prioritise their work onto the patients who most need pharmacy issues addressed. This
assessment is done on admission and recorded in their own module called PharmacyView,
meaning that at the start of the day they can very quickly plan their round of which patients,
where and when.
What about the new features you mentioned?
Obviously these things are up to the users and whether there’s funding, but I can at least
pass on what people say. One big thing would be to help keep me up to date by getting rid
of duplication. So at the moment when something’s done on a paper form – a falls risk
assessment, say – then you have to separately record that you’ve done it onto WardView. It
would be great if ward staff had electronic forms in Trakcare which would automatically tell
WardView when they had been completed. Another example is that red alert triangle you
can see in the picture of me. It says there’s an alert about the patient, but not what the alert
is about. You have to go into Trakcare to find that out. So maybe you should be able find
out by just tapping the triangle, assuming any confidentiality issues could be sorted.
Another thing that would be appreciated, I think, is some statistics. For example you could
let each ward know how they compare in terms of keeping the Clinical Quality Indicator
columns up to date.
Well thanks very much. Any last comment?
Just to say that I’ve heard there are now Clinical Leads in post, who can be contacted at
[email protected] . If any of my users want to pass on their thoughts to
WardView user group that’s due to be set up then I’m sure they can use this address to do
that.
May 2015