Amid acute staff shortages in healthcare, streamlining on-site communications and addressing information gaps at the point of care are key to boosting staff productivity and improving patient outcomes. 

While the COVID-19 pandemic has strained the healthcare system to breaking point, staff shortages in the sector are structural rather than a short-term issue. The shortage is exacerbated by the fact that the rate of turnover among nurses is significantly higher than that of other industries. Burnout is a key factor contributing to the poor retention of nurses, an issue that has only grown worse during the pandemic. 

At the same time, the demand for acute care services continues to track upward year-on-year these days. The situation presents a significant risk to the standards of care that the community expects to receive and that the profession expects to deliver. Yet it is not possible to stem the flow of workers from the industry in time to avert a crisis. The solution to safeguarding standards of care is to use technology to make existing healthcare staff as productive as possible.

Addressing embedded inefficiencies in on-site alerts and communications is critical to improving healthcare delivery, as communication issues can lead to medical errors. Fast, accurate, and efficient communication between co-workers is important for quick caregiver response to a range of issues, including bed status alarms and falls. This allows healthcare workers to consume and act on time-sensitive information more effectively, to maximise their productivity. It can also reduce alarm fatigue, better coordinate dispersed teams, reduce the risk of errors, and close information gaps that can impact coordination and workflows.

Healthcare is all about communications; every single aspect of what happens in a healthcare environment is interlaced with a series of communications, and often they are absolutely time-critical. If you’ve got embedded communications inefficiencies, then staff shortages become fundamentally worse. That inefficiency flows right through the care paradigm to the point where someone is missing out on the care they need.

Ascom’s integrated workflow intelligence consolidates contextual alerts from multiple systems onto one unified communications platform. This bridges information gaps across points of care and extends the reach of actionable insights and orchestration, which support better-informed clinical decisions. Traditionally, healthcare and patient monitoring systems are discrete and containerised, forcing staff to juggle a range of alerts with little uniformity. Ascom’s on-site healthcare solutions are open, vendor-agnostic and standards-based. They can integrate with a wide range of healthcare devices, systems, and apps to deliver contextualised alerts in a consumable format. Rather than expecting healthcare providers to rip out and replace existing systems, the adoption of integrated and unified on-site communications allows them to leverage existing infrastructure and investments better.

Along with bridging digital information gaps and improving the immediate care of patients, enhanced communications can also deliver analytics for reporting and actionable insights to deliver long-term workplace efficiencies. This can include capturing the timeframes of which staff members respond to alerts and which don’t to understand choke points in communication and workflows. Unified, contextually appropriate, real-time communication and collaboration tools ensure that alerts are not generated at a patient’s bedside but instead transmitted to the appropriate team member and escalated accordingly through the use of routing tables. Providing contextually-derived messaging to all staff is far more effective than generic bedside alerts or simply sending alerts to a display hanging on the wall.  A growing body of research also points to the importance of ‘‘the quiet hospital’’ and intensive care unit, with a reduction in ambient noise assisting with both staff productivity and patient recovery.

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