Smartphone app to transform how hospital care is improved
A new smartphone app introduced at Barts Health hospitals is revolutionising how nurses and doctors check the quality of care on their wards, and freeing up time for them to spend with patients.
The Perfect Ward app helps staff to quickly complete a set of questions monitoring the key indicators of high quality care and put things right there and then.
The app, which is available on smartphones and tablets, gives nurses and doctors data about the care in their ward in real time, saving hours that would be spent writing up and analysing the findings from paper-based audits.
The technology captures everything from the basics such as ensuring patients have enough to drink or whether the medicine cabinet is locked correctly, through to more complex indicators like assessing the processes used to spot and treat sepsis infections or pressure ulcers.
Barts Health Chief Nurse Caroline Alexander said: “This is going to revolutionise how we improve services. It means we can check the things that matter to our patients quickly and spot recurring trends at our fingertips. It also makes it easier for our busy teams on wards to go through their regular checks.”
Through using the app staff on wards can fix issues immediately, while the results are all uploaded centrally meaning themes can be analysed across the Trust, helping teams to secure long-term, sustainable improvement.
Emma Calderon, senior sister on Syringa Ward at Whipps Cross Hospital said: “I find the Perfect Ward app incredibly useful. It supports me to get insights from my staff, patients and their families on the care we provide, and they can feedback or raise concerns without pressure. It is a more structured way of reviewing what we can improve on, and we are now more aware of the things we need to ensure we provide our patients with high quality care.”
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About Perfect Ward
Perfect Ward's mission is to help clinicians improve quality, through the use of a simple, easy-to-use app. A Bolt Partners product, Perfect Ward, is a smartphone application available on IOS and Android, offering users the opportunity to carry out inspections in real time. The app can be customised for all healthcare environments and is currently in use in acute, community and ambulance trusts and care homes. Perfect Ward is intuitive, incredibly easy to use and saves considerable administration time when compared to existing pen and paper methodology.