Hospitals are trying to address the nursing shortage with better staffing levels, more flexible scheduling and higher salaries, however it is also necessary to reduce the time nurses spend on administration, paperwork and other indirect tasks and to increase the time they spend at their patients’ bedside.

No single solution will immediately improve nurse recruitment and retention. However, better communications and easier access to relevant information can go a long way to addressing the issues that have aggravated the nursing shortage. Advanced nurse call systems provide the tools enabling performance improvement initiatives.

“Care Management and Information Systems” provide significant workflow productivity tools and benefits. Wireless telephony further supports the patient safety initiative of the named nurse, providing up to a 50% efficiency dividends for each nurse for each shift and in addition, provides a similar efficiency dividends for doctors enabling a saving of approximately £4 Million per medium sized hospital per annum.

The benefits of logging and recording patient / caregiver interactions enables caregivers from the next shift to quickly check automated events which occurred during previous shifts, providing enhancements to patient safety and quality assurance. Additionally this data augments the patient electronic records without staff having to spend more care giving time documenting events. This type of data collection enables rich data mining and links to exiting Business Intelligence and other reporting tools and corporate dashboards