How Valuable is a Nurse’s Time?
Picture the scene. A nurse arrives at the mobile computer charging bay on a ward to pick up a device to start a shift and it isn’t there. Maybe it’s been left somewhere and forgotten about or maybe it’s been left on a different ward or department entirely?
The nurse then spends anything up to thirty minutes (an average of three minutes) locating a device that is (hopefully) charged. This is three minutes of their time wasted, or put another way, three minutes that could have been spent caring for patients.
In a single case, an average of three minutes doesn’t sound like a long period of time. But imagine if this happened to three hundred nurses throughout an entire hospital during the course of a single shift on any given day.
Three minutes per nurse – nine hundred minutes. Over the course of two shifts per day? One thousand eight hundred minutes of time wasted each and every day. Twelve thousand six hundred minutes wasted each week; around fifty thousand four hundred minutes wasted each month.
With a single patient consultation or treatment time taking an average of approximately thirty minutes, this wasted time equates to roughly one thousand six hundred and eighty patient appointments or treatments every month.
Those seemingly insignificant three minutes certainly add up, making for slightly alarming reading and sobering statistics which are definitely a cause for concern.
It is not up for debate that time is a hugely valuable commodity that we simply cannot afford to waste within the NHS. Wards are understaffed and clinicians are currently stretched beyond reasonable capacity.
Surely getting this time back in the NHS’ and indeed the patients’ hour of need would benefit all concerned?
Knowing where mission-critical digital devices are at all times within a hospital is essential. These devices form an integral component within today’s clinical environments in terms of patient safety and care. If they are not at a clinician’s disposal as and when they are needed, it begs the question as to why they were purchased in the first instance.
Protect and Maximise Your Investment with Waizu Solutions from Dakota Healthcare
Investment in purpose-built digital hardware and software solutions often forms a significant but thoroughly necessary financial component firmly nestled within the vast majority of Trusts’ annual budgets.
For those that are able to invest and ‘go digital,’ it is no doubt an expenditure which has been carefully undertaken with much consideration in order to improve the working lives of the clinicians operating within that particular facility as well as the experience of the patients under its care.
Harnessing a firm understanding of the value of any digital hardware investment, Waizu’s solutions are designed to ensure that this substantial financial outlay does not go to waste and helps to put thousands of hours of wasted nurses’ time back into patient care.
Not only that; its solutions can also help mitigate unnecessary expenditure undertaken by many Trusts in purchasing additional devices in order to compensate for anticipated device loss. Not losing them in the first instance would surely be beneficial in an era of ever-tightening purse strings.
Waizu’s Virtual Smart Cabinet (VSC) Solution provides an extremely robust system to capture all device data helping to containerise the devices in order to reduce misplacement and loss.
The solution effectively provides all devices with a virtual ‘home’ within a variety of locations such as a charging cabinet, a lockable room, a table, a shelf or any kind of generic zone or area, thus helping to define what a ‘missing device’ actually means.
The VSC understands which user has which specific device and can also define whether or not the device is in an idle state. If it is idle for a defined period of time or has no user assigned to it but it is not in its ‘home,’ the VSC alerts staff to locate the device and place it back into its home or alternatively use the device again by logging back into it.
Waizu’s Device Finder tool offers the intelligent tracking of devices through the knowledge of WiFi locations within any kind of healthcare facility. If a device should be housed within an A&E department but is in the Radiology department instead, the system sends out an alert that it has been misplaced or is inactive and therefore potentially missing, helping to pinpoint its exact location and enabling the user to proactively find, retrieve and redeploy the device instantly within its correct location.
Wise Up with Waizu
Ultimately, lost or misplaced devices not only cause a drain on financial resources due to over-buying or replacement costs; they also cause a huge drain on time and ultimately unnecessarily take away potentially thousands of nursing and treatment hours every year within any given hospital or healthcare facility.
The benefits of the Waizu solutions are far-reaching, both in terms of budget protection and putting critical nursing hours back into care, helping to ease the effect of staffing shortages and the ever-increasing patient footfall.
With the number of nurses currently leaving the profession in droves and austerity within the healthcare sector having long since been the norm, solutions to help combat these issues should undoubtedly be considered and without delay, as time and money are simply not available to waste.
About Waizu
Waizu is the UK’s leader in providing software tools required to slash the problem of missing/lost devices and to facilitate highly efficient and secure issuing/returning of those devices. Waizu is the Japanese for ‘Wise’. The Waizu portfolio of Device Finder, Virtual Smart Cabinet & Device Insights enable both operations and IT teams to make wise decisions that drive better productivity and cost reductions. If you’d like to ‘wise up’ please visit www.getwaizu.com
About Dakota Healthcare
Dakota Healthcare provides true integration expertise across a broad range of healthcare applications, enabling medical professionals in over 200 NHS Trusts and Private Hospital Groups to understand and adopt digitalised data capture technologies. Our fit-for-purpose solutions have been created with the efficient communication between medical professionals in mind, in addition to enhancing and enriching patient care. We have considerable experience in deploying Patient ID systems at admission as well as point-of-care, domiciliary care, asset-tracking and inventory control solutions into leading hospital systems such as Meditech, Cerner, Dedalus (formerly Lorenzo), CliniSys (formerly Sunquest) and Epic Software. Our relationships with industry-leading hardware manufacturers and software providers help us bring best-of-breed products and solutions to our healthcare clients, thanks to our close working relationships with framework resellers and the NHS Supply Chain.
For further information visit www.dakotais.co.uk
