More efficient means of communications and better managed workflow are necessary in healthcare to reduce the number of hospital-based events that put life and limb in danger, says Zach Selch, Managing Director: International at Rauland.
Selch says "440 000 people die every year in US hospitals as a result of preventable errors, the biggest cause of which is poor communication".
Selch visited SA as a guest of UC-Wireless, distributor of Rauland's nurse call systems, and was addressing the need for faster and more efficient response from nurses to prevent what medical professionals call "sentinel events" - unexpected occurrences that result in the death or serious injury of a patient. UC-Wireless is the African distributor for Rauland, and is working with regional reseller partners in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and establishing Mozambique and Namibia, among other countries in Africa and the Islands.
While most of us are familiar with the "bell-and-beep" approach to calling a nurse in hospital, Rauland's products improve what the old systems do, sending the perfect person to the patient's bedside at the right time, Selch says: "There is no point in wasting a specialist or nurse's time with getting water to a thirsty patient when ward assistant staff can do that. At the same time, when someone is having a heart attack, you want to get the right people, with a crash cart, right there at their bedside in the shortest time possible. Bell-and-beep isn't able to give you that because the process is too long - someone presses the bell, the nurse walks to the bed to find out what is going on, then runs back to a phone to call the heart cardio and crash cart," Selch explains. "Our system calls everyone simultaneously at the first press of a button. It is simply what the system does."
Rauland's products have been available in SA for a number of years, and Selch says the new partnership with UC-Wireless is helping to overcome misconceptions the local market has about its products and to highlight its benefits. "Typically people are thinking about solving one basic problem, namely a patient trying to call a nurse. But the problems our products solve for a hospital are about dramatically improving patient experience, delivering an improved work life for the nurse, improving the efficiency of a hospital by turning over operating theatres 20-30% faster, reducing staff turnover, moving resources around the hospital quicker, and ensuring staff and patients' safety. These are not things people think of when they think of a basic nurse call system."
Selch says the problems South African hospitals face are universal. "The reality is that you are never going to know how many more people you would have saved had you had a few more minutes. We've delivered solutions from the USA into Mexico, Brazil, India, Singapore, Hong Kong and Norway and our products have proven themselves in very diverse markets and solve problems that hospitals have across the world."
He acknowledges that Rauland's products don't offer a cure-all, but says that even a hospital that has trouble with basic electric and water supply may be looking for a security solution for their staff or ways to better organise people or resources to lower the amount of time that nurses have to walk through the hallways.
"There is an overlap of problems and the problems that Rauland solves are for the most part problems that you will find in a lot of the hospitals in urban and peri-urban SA and Africa. Hospitals are always trying to make the environment safer for their patients and staff."
"One of the things our products do is facilitating teamwork between nurses by reducing the need to personally tell one another about giving a patient medicine, for instance. Nurses get busy. They're human or they forget. Those kinds of things are where the lack of communications support and facilities mean that nurses are not as effective as a team."
One local hospital group is considering the range of products because it will significantly improve the teamwork among nurses, Selch said. "Nurses spend around 35% of their time coordinating care and 35% documenting care - our solution significantly cuts both of those."
In summary Selch believes that South African and African hospitals will greatly benefit from Rauland, not only for safety and communications but also significant for ROI which is proven given the fact that Rauland is now found in emerging economies globally, such as South America.
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