Hospital at Night Team’s simple solution to improve patient care

23 September 2019

A team at the Trust which runs Shropshire’s acute hospitals has come up with a simple solution to improve the care of patients who need medical treatment during the night.

The Hospital at Night Team at The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (SaTH) has developed highly-visual alert labels which can be placed in a patient’s notes to ensure that those who were poorly overnight are seen first when medical teams do their rounds the following morning.

The scheme has been rolled out across the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Princess Royal Hospital, Telford.

Clare Walsgrove, Hospital at Night Matron, said: “At a recent team meeting we were discussing patients that we had seen overnight and how we could ensure they received a prompt review the following morning.

“After a board round, most teams review their sickest patients first, but we recognised that the patients that we had seen overnight would not necessarily have a high score on the National Early Warning Score system, because our intervention had helped them.

“We felt that these patients still warranted an early review in the morning in case teams needed to follow anything up, such as blood results or requests for more investigations.”

The plan is to eventually include the information on the Trust’s electronic patient information screens, but this cannot be done immediately.

Clare said: “Abi Scriven, one of our Nurse Practitioners, came up with the idea of producing the labels while we progress the idea to add an icon to the patient information screens, as we didn’t want to wait.

“We felt this was important for our patients to move this forward as quickly as possible to ensure they were seen promptly after they had been poorly overnight and to ensure that their treatment plans were updated following an episode of deterioration.”