New Silent Patient Call Bell System Being Trialled in PN Hospital

11/11/2009 | Patient call system trial

A new silent patient call bell system being trialled in a ward at Palmerston North Hospital will allow nurses to come to their own patients, and not disturb the rest of the patients in the ward.

The opportunity to trial the new system came with the recent splitting of the medical ward 27, roughly in half – to accommodate a new 13-bed Medical Assessment and Planning Unit (MAPU) – and retain the existing ward beds - with a call bell system to meet the needs of the two units on the same floor.

The MAPU assesses medical patients until they need to be either moved into a ward, or sent home. The majority of early admissions to MAPU have been general internal medicine patients (84%), cardiology (10%), respiratory (5%), and renal medicine (1.2%). More than 125 patients used the new ward in September with more than 75 discharged home. The average length of stay was 13 hours.
The new system ensures that the nurse looking after a MAPU patient is in receipt of a paging call the moment the patient presses their bell.  This is done by loading the appropriate bed call bell into individual pagers carried by each nurse.  If the nurse is unable to answer that page, (this is recognised because the bell is not cancelled at the bedside), the system will then default to the unit co-ordinator.  If it still is not answered it then defaults to all nurse pagers.

The beauty of the system is that there is a significant sound reduction on the ward and nurses only have to be alerted to their own patient's needs.

In a patient emergency the call bell overrides the system and sounds across both ward 27 and MAPU ensuring full awareness and the ability to assist each other.

Early indications are that the trial is proceeding well and that the system may be progressed to other wards of the hospital.