Shift handover risk to patient

Published Date: 10 April 2010

POOR handover procedures in hospitals pose a “significant risk” to patients, doctors’ representatives have claimed.

The Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland said there were now an increasing number of shift changes, following the launch of the European Working Time Directive, limiting the hours doctors are allowed to work.

It said there were renewed concerns of a breakdown in continuity of care as patients were being repeatedly handed over to different shifts. The union is backing a Royal College of Physicians investigation into the issue and wants doctors to report any incidents.

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Is the Solution mobile data capture?

Kelvin Connect are a Scottish Company &  innovative developer of mobile data capture and management systems based on hand-held computers (PDAs) for use by large organisations with a mobile workforce. Our development techniques overcome the complexities of handling structured documents on hand-held computers for both data capture and data access applications.

In General Hospitals, Team Talk has been deployed in many hospitals to enable ‘Hospital at Night’ services to be implemented, enabling fast, efficient and accurate data to be collected at the point of care and this data to be efficiently handed-over to the next shift.

The benefits of a system like this are:

* Complete, mobile IT systems customised for specific disciplines

* No transcription from paper forms

* Clean, validated data collected at the point of care ensures consistently high-quality care

* Reporting time dramatically reduced

* A highly effective mobile front-end to EPR systems

* Safer and more accurate handovers

Click the following link to find out more about Kelvin Connect and mobile data capture