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Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the UK’s biggest providers of integrated hospital and community-based healthcare, offering a comprehensive range of local and tertiary services. Within the organization, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) plays a critical role in caring for the most vulnerable patients—newborns requiring advanced medical support due to prematurity, congenital conditions, or severe illness.
The NICU serves as a regional referral center and is equipped with advanced clinical technology, supported by a multidisciplinary team committed to high-quality, familycentered care. The Trust’s Digital Strategy (2023–2028) and broader innovation agenda guide the adoption of digital solutions across clinical services, including neonatal care.
As part of this strategy, the Trust engaged Ascom as a vendorneutral Medical Device Integration (MDI) partner to enable connectivity between neonatal ventilators and the NICU’s Clinical Information System (CIS).
It should be considered critical—or even mandatory—to have automatic upload of
ventilator settings and patient values into the patient record. Having this data reliably
recorded makes clinical reviews and decision-making much easier and less stressful.
Ventilator record keeping and compliance
Ventilator settings and patient physiological measurements that are documented in patient notes are not just a clinical necessity—they also form part of the legal medical record. Inaccurate or incomplete documentation can carry regulatory, professional, and legal implications.
Under the UK’s GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, health data—especially ventilator parameters—must be accurately recorded and securely stored, and accessible only to authorized clinicians. Clinical standards (such as guidelines from National Respiratory Therapy Colleges) also require clear documentation of ventilator mode, input settings, and measured patient values to support handovers, audits, and, when necessary, mortality and adverse events reviews.
...following a change in ventilator mode or settings can introduce risk during shift transitions or clinical reviews. During patient mortality reviews, recorded ventilator data is reviewed to ascertain if the correct clinical decisions were made and implemented in line with clinical guidelines. This task currently involves reviewing manually entered information in the CIS, extracting raw data from medical devices (if available), and interviewing staff.
In the NICU environment, timely and accurate documentation of ventilator data is essential for clinical decision-making, continuity of care and accuracy of the patient record, leading to the following areas of focus and measurement.