Patient care is a hospital’s top priority. To achieve excellent care, systems need to be put into place to ensure caregivers’ needs are taken care of, and patients’ needs are clearly understood. Convergint, partnered with West-Com, can provide a variety of solutions to keep hospitals running smoothly and patients as comfortable and cared for as possible.
Increasing Care Staff Morale & Productivity
Care staff work in a busy, noisy, and stressful environment, in which they constantly have to adjust to new situations and regulations. Putting a focus on making care staff happier at work will improve their morale, their performance, and in turn, the overall patient satisfaction score.
Well-implemented technology can reduce stress and help make their workflow more manageable. West-Com’s Workflow Station allows the clinical team to set care reminders, communicate with ancillary services, set and review patient safety status, and request equipment. This helps prevent errors, saves time, and allows the care staff to care for their patients.
Freeing Up Time for Patient Care
Patients and family members gauge how well care staff listens not by whether or not they have been heard, but how care staff responds to their questions and concerns. Providing patients and families with assuring verbal and nonverbal responses shows them that not only is care staff listening, but that they care. This seems easy enough to do, but often the demanding patient care environment unwittingly reduces the care staff’s abilities to give patients the time and support they need during the healing process.
West-Com’s Patient CareBoard™, located inside the patient room, is an electronic whiteboard designed to answer patients’ and family members’ commonly asked questions regarding care plans, medications, conditions, mobility, schedule, and discharge. This keeps the patient and family members well-informed and reduces their use of the nurse request button. Care staff is freed up to spend more direct care time with those who need it most, and patients feel that they have been heard.
Keeping Facilities Clean
Preventing hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) is a priority initiative at most healthcare facilities. Many factors contribute to these patient safety threats, including unkept bathrooms, messy patient rooms, and lingering meal trays. Every department, clinical and non-clinical, must share accountability in preventing environmental HACs, and nursing must have an easy way of communicating patient safety concerns. WestCom’s workflow and communication tools provide an easy way to notify departments, such as EVS or Dietary, about patient rooms that need attention. These requests can be received in many ways, including text messaging, or they can be integrated into an existing work request ticketing system.
Reducing Nighttime Noise
The World Health Organization and Environmental Protection Agency both recommend that night-time noise levels in patient rooms be at or below 35 decibels. Today the sound levels inside hospitals average 67 decibels at night, and a hospital conversation often reaches 60 decibels. Noise at these levels have a direct impact on the health and healing process of patients. Patients exposed to the loudest sounds can lose up to two hours of sleep each night, which can trigger a host of health problems.
Silent communication tools can be used with the patient, family, and caregivers to decrease noise by reducing redundant conversations. SoundHealth® is used to measure, notify, and report noise concerns on patient care units, and its “Quiet Mode” setting automatically adjusts nurse call alerts to an appropriate level for the evening and nighttime hours.
Improving Communication about Pain
Studies show that there is no correlation between pain control levels and patient satisfaction. Most patients surveyed were satisfied or very satisfied with their overall pain management, regardless of their pain intensity scores; however, data does reveal that patients who feel they have good communication with their doctors and nurses are the most likely to report satisfaction with the relief of their pain. There are several ways in which West-Com’s Novus® Connect facilitates pain management communication between the patient and the care staff:
1. The pain med button on the pillow speaker gives the patient control over when they feel the need to request a pain evaluation.
2. The pain reassessment reminder option on the West-Com Workflow Station reminds caregivers when it is time to reassess the patient’s pain level.
3. The Patient CareBoard™ can provide patients with pain management schedules and information about their pain medications
These solutions provide care staff with the tools necessary to take control of a challenging patient care environment and increase patient satisfaction.