Ensuring effective communication and the safety of doctors, nurses and other staff members in a hectic, constantly changing hospital environment is a challenge in healthcare. Hospital staff members can be exposed to high risk situations throughout their working day or week and need support. Plus this can happen all over the hospital in:
- Waiting & examination rooms
- Bathrooms
- Car parks
With risk exposure to altercations with:
- Acutely or permanently mentally disturbed patients
- Other patients, their relatives and friends
Yet wireless pager technology can be used to help and support staff in these and other situations. Here are 5 ways the wireless pager can help.
1. Replaces existing staff badges using wireless technology
Wireless pager badges are the size and shape of existing staff badges that can be worn on lanyards, however with these badges hospitals benefit from real-time location, text messaging, and emergency switches to improve the staff safety in all hospital locations.
The wireless capabilities work with existing hospital networks, with all features working in and out doors, with location positioning down to 1 metre. In addition the pager back end office software has escalation and built-in incident recording and reporting capabilities.
2. Use wireless distress signals
Wearing a wireless pager, mobile staff members can send a distress signal that contains their location, to security personnel and other staff members. Using the backend office software wireless pagers can be located throughout a hospital including its site, with visibility at site, building, floor and room level.
3. Emergency alert switches
A hospital or mobile worker can send an emergency alert to other devices or systems such as mobile phones, VOIP phones and computers, as well as to other wireless pager units in the hospital.
A healthcare worker can simply “pull down” on the pager activating a switch, where an emergency alert message is sent via the Wi-Fi network. As the message is sent, the pager’s location is calculated within milliseconds and the text message alert and location information are delivered to devices and people on an escalation list. The healthworker who activated the emergency alert receives an acknowledgement that their call for help has been received, by the pager buzzing and blinking its onboard LEDs. In built into the technology is an automatic retry capability to ensure that the emergency alert message is sent and that the incident escalation has occurred, to help guarantee the message delivery. The solution requires an acknowledgement from another staff member that the incident is being responded to and the system also requests that the incident is documented, with the cause and resolution information is stored for longer term reporting purposes.
4. Work flow management
Wireless pagers communicate only a few bytes of information per event and hence have no meaningful impact on network traffic, enabling two-way text messaging capabilities that can be used for many other day to day routine tasks to inform staff members and to improve their work-flow. For example putting calls out to groups of healthcare workers to respond to emergencies. Using wireless technology responses can occur using the pagers rather than hospital workers running to phones to make calls based on traditional pager calls.
5. Rapid deployment for existing and new staff
Knowing the exact time and location of a staff safety incident can significantly reduce response times and reduce the likelihood of severe injury or even death. By leveraging the existing Wi-Fi networks, hospitals and other healthcare facilities can have a staff safety system up and running in a few weeks without the burden involved with installing cables, readers and other unnecessary proprietary hardware that can interfere with clinical equipment and require the isolation and decontamination of construction areas. This means new pagers can be up and running quickly for both an initial deployment and for new staff.