Measurable Improvement to Hospital Communications – Pediatric Quality & Safety Article

July, 2018

Child in hospital bed

A recently released article in the Journal of Pediatric Quality and Safety shows the independent research results of an observational study on how to reduce the time nurses and physicians spend on communication tasks that take them away from patient care in a critical care environment.

The journal article details how Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital reduced:

• The time for roaming staff to respond to verbal queries from 120 to 9 seconds
• The time to connect incoming phone calls from 35 to 11 seconds
• The rate of staff-initiated emergency events from 2.17 to 1.69 per 100 occupied bed days

The article was published by Dr. Adrian C. Plunkett, Consultant Intensivist at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

In this short video, watch Dr. Plunkett and his team demonstrate their use of the solution that helped them achieve these results:

Measuring the Impact of Real-Time Communications

Dr. Plunkett launched an initiative to implement the Vocera system in the PICU and designed a research study to measure the solution’s effect on communication efficiency in 2014. The hospital completed more than 200 hours of direct time-motion observation and a 50-member staff survey, both before and after deployment of their Vocera solution.

"It’s a personal interest of mine to improve the satisfaction of our colleagues because the more we improve our working environment the more timely care we can provide for our patients,” said Dr. Plunkett in a case study that discusses the hospital’s results in detail.

“We spend a lot of our time in intensive care having conversations that are very crucial to patient outcomes,” he said. “If there are obstacles to those conversations – communications delays, colleagues we can’t locate – it makes it harder to do our jobs. Vocera removes those obstacles. It definitely makes our lives easier.”

After deploying the Vocera system, the hospital recorded dramatic reductions in response times, which are detailed in the case study.

“The Vocera numbers speak for themselves,” said Dr. Plunkett, “and they show this technology can dramatically reduce the time it takes to connect with a colleague and get a response. That has a real impact on the care we provide.”