Is great to know money is being ploughed into research into shift handover systems for healthcare. But what about right now in meeting healthcare needs at a ward level? I was inspired, thanks to support from Lee at Headshift, to blog on a UKUPA presentation on shift handover systems by the Centre for HCI Design at London’s City University. And I also saw from my own research experience in the NHS how valuable a tool it was; a fact later backed up by the recent WHO report on patient safety. And so I looked at devising some kind of a solution, and was advised by Ross Mayfield at Socialtext to first get a prototype together.

I came up with a social software approach to the problem, and with the help of some great people including my entreprenuerial cousin James (based at Invensys) put a proposal together. However, this first attempt sadly failed to go any further. But thanks to blogging on this site on the issue Dinesh from Works Software based in Cambridge, with the Lifetrack product got in touch with their tried and tested shift handover solution, which is already being used in the power generation industry. After a meeting I decided to help see if I could find a route for their product into the healthcare market, drawing on some of my more recent experience at Medicexchange.

After a bit of thinking on how best to do this it’s now been submitted to the NHS National Innovation Centre (NIC). I should stress it uses none of the ideas from my initial proposal, which is still covered by a ‘NDA‘!

Anyhow I hope I can help Lifetrack succeed, and if I get chance to visit the NIC it will be great to say hi to my former chair at the HDA, Dame Yves Buckland, who is head of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, which runs the NIC.

Our evaluation of your idea has resulted in our investigating the strengths and weaknesses of the current hand-over protocols on wards, and discovering that your concept is not new to them – they have seen similar products and evaluted their use on wards previously, with uniformly unsuccessful outcomes.

Since those evaluations the DH Connecting for Health programme has developed the Patient Admission System which to a large extent provides staff with details of a patients progress – the key details that are needed at shift hand-over.

For this reason, we suggest that you contact the Local Service Providers (LSP) for the CfH programme to evaluate interest in incorporating your product in their suite of tools.

Details of LSPs will be found on the CfH website.

Best Wishes,
Operations Manager,
National Innovation Centre.