Pennine uses iSoft whiteboards

A whiteboard in action

Pennine Acute Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has given itself four months to have electronic whiteboards live in almost 100 wards across its five hospitals.

The trust has already launched the electronic boards in four wards, and will begin rolling-out the technology to the remaining 93 wards in January.

It expects the wider roll-out to take less than three months, with a total of 97 wards having a whiteboard in operation by the end of March.

The VisiWard technology from iSoft, a CSC company, takes information from the trust’s PatientCentre patient administration system and displays this along with bed status in real time.

The information displayed on the boards includes the patient’s name, age, room, bed, consultant’s name, admission date and expected discharge date.

The trust decided to implement the whiteboards following a review of the hand-written whiteboards now in use, which was undertaken as the trust upgraded its PAS. The review found each ward was using the hand-written process differently.

Consequently, the trust decided to take advantage of an agreement it made with iSoft in 2010 for clinical applications, and introduce the boards.

Project manager Mick Heaton said this was also helping to make sure that information entered into the PAS was kept up to date, and saving staff time.

The whiteboards were trialled in eight wards and are now live in four wards across the Royal Oldham, Fairfield and North Manchester Hospitals, covering rehabilitation, orthopaedic and trauma patients.

The trust plans to expand the functionality of the boards by including more clinical information such as infections, diabetes and special dietary needs in future phases.

It also wants to give non-operational staff, such as the catering team, read-only access to the boards via the web.

The final phase of the roll-out, to be completed by the end of 2012, is intended to allow staff to use the touch-screens to update the PAS, and enable staff to drag and drop patients into a different bed or ward.