Patient info at the touch of a button

PATIENTS at Yeovil District Hospital will soon be benefitting from the latest in handheld healthcare technology.

The hospital received more than £300,000 after submitting a successful bid to the Department of Health’s Nurse Technology Fund to implement state-of-the-art facilities which allows nurses to electronically record patients’ vital signs data.

Instead of using paper-based charts for information such as pulse, blood pressure and breathing rate, nurses on wards will enter the data into a handheld device.

The system automatically analyses the data, immediately identifying any change in a patient’s condition that may require extra attention.

Yeovil is one of just 75 trusts in the country to secure money through the new fund, which was announced by the Prime Minister last year as a way of providing NHS nurses with the very latest in equipment and skills to improve patient care.

Yeovil’s director of nursing, Helen Ryan, said: “This is great news for our hospital and our patients.

“We see technology as having an important role to play on our wards, further enhancing the abilities of our skilled and compassionate nursing workforce.

“This new system will ensure they have instant access to the information they need to make the best possible decisions about a patient’s care, swiftly and safely.”

The hospital will begin implementing the technology during the coming weeks, piloting it in a small number of wards first and aiming to be using it across all wards by September this year.

This is the latest in a series of successful funding bids by Yeovil Hospital, which has secured more than one million in national healthcare investments in the past year.

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