PRESS INFORMATION

Goteborg, Sweden
February 2009

Patient safety strengthened with NetPage

Hillerød, Denmark: Ascom NetPage has solved a major stress problem and clearly improved the patient safety in ward 121 at Hillerød Hospital. Nurses no longer have to search for colleagues to provide information. They now write messages to each others pagers. This gives more time for patient care and saves money as well as eliminating time and disturbances involved with finding colleagues.

Ward 121 at Hillerød Hospital cares for patients who are hospitalized for surgical operations. Patients are assigned to a permanent nurse during hospitalization. Before the installation of NetPage the nurses spent a lot of time searching for each other when a patient came back from surgery and need to be moved to another room. NetPage, the IP messaging tool from Ascom, allows employees to send messages from a computer in the office directly to the colleague’s pagers. NetPage has clearly improved the daily work at the Danish hospital.

“When a patient comes back from surgery, awakening, the nurse at the office needs to find the patient's assigned nurse. This could disturb three or four employees in their work before the nurse was found. Interruptions increased stress levels and led to greater risk of errors, which was a direct threat to patient safety. Now we just write "PT from the OP” on the computer, when a patient comes back from surgery, after which the message is sent directly to the relevant nurses paging,” says Birgitte Holst Wiehl, clinical supervisor at Hillerød Hospital.

Fewer disturbances give more time for patients
When the nurses enters work, he or she equips themselves with one of the wards pagers, writing down the number of the pager and their name on a list. The list is always available beside the NetPage computer in the office. NetPage gives a great overview of all pagers and messages sent.

“Earlier, we received only patient calls on our pagers. All practical messages about finished records, receiving patients and moving patients to another room were given orally. This led to unnecessary disturbance because we had to run around and look for each other. Now the nurse is directly notified when a patient is withdrawn from operation, or a record is written. Ultimately, it is not only a major economic saving for the hospital, because of a more efficient work, but also a clear patient benefit. Our patients experience more calm, less disruption of care and probably fewer mistakes,” says Birgitte Holst Wiehl.

NetPage solves future challenges
NetPage is considered as a very user-friendly system and requires no special training. Despite the introduction of a large number of new IT systems in the same period the obvious benefits with the system have attracted interest from other hospital departments and wards.

“Employees see the benefits with NetPage and our doctors have also started to use the system to call the nurses. The next step will be to implement call options in the system which might improve the situation further, "says Birgitte Holst Wiehl and continues: “Hospital's future challenge is certainly to reduce the number of small disturbances and disruptions to daily life stress that can cause unfortunate mistakes.”

For further information please contact:
Henrik Skafte
Ascom Wireless Solutions Denmark
Phone +45 87 22 49 70

ÜBER ASCOM

Ascom ist ein internationaler Lösungsanbieter mit umfassendem Technologie-Know-how in Mission-Critical Communication. Das Unternehmen fokussiert sich auf die Bereiche Wireless Solutions (hochstehende, kundenspezifische On-site-Kommunikationslösungen) und Network Testing (ein weltweiter Marktführer für Test- und Optimierungslösungen von Mobilfunknetzen). Das Unternehmen mit Sitz in der Schweiz ist mit Niederlassungen in 17 Ländern vertreten und beschäftigt weltweit rund 1'900 Mitarbeitende. Die Ascom Namenaktien (Symbol ASCN) sind an der SIX Swiss Exchange in Zürich (Schweiz) kotiert.

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