University Hospitals Plymouth goes live with Hospital at Night

University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust is continuing its digital transformation with the introduction of Nervecentre’s Hospital At Night.

The centralised, mobile digital platform means that patient care during the night shift can be closely monitored and prioritised as necessary. Between 20:00 and 08:00, the software is used to ensure ward requests are sent electronically to the acute care team coordinators. They can then assign tasks to their medical colleagues with one click.

The system offers real-time information so it’s simple for the acute care team to know which doctors are available, where they are in the hospital and what their current workload looks like and assign tasks to the most suitable clinician.

The move sees Plymouth join University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust which both run Hospital At Night.

Dr Marc Bertagne, internal medicine trainee at the trust, said: “The system is well designed and easy to use. The combination of receiving audible alerts upon the allocation of a task with the ability to instantly message colleagues regarding patient care, enables the junior doctors to work efficiently during out of hours operations.”

Going live with Hospital At Night is just another step on the trust’s overarching project to digitalise patient care. The introduction of Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA) also formed part of the Digital Care project. The next phase is to replace the current ED management system with a Nervecentre solution that can take electronic observations and improve sepsis pathways.

The trust’s deputy medical director, Paul McArdle, added: “Hospital At Night provides information that ultimately means significant benefits in both efficiencies and safety for our patients and for our staff.

“I am always proud of the work of our teams here in the Trust, but when projects of this magnitude are implemented into the organisation, it makes me feel incredibly proud to see the work of so many come together for the benefit of our patients and help our colleagues’ workloads more manageable.”