CEO Colin Reid urges nursing community to act quickly in order to transform their working practices
TotalMobile, the international mobile technology expert, was at EHI Live last week to provide advice for organisations considering applying for the anticipated NHS England £100m nurse technology fund which is due to open very soon.
The fund, which aims to “reduce the time spent on form filling and bureaucracy, freeing up time for face-to-face patient care” was initially announced by Prime Minister David Cameron last October. According to the Department of Health, this ambition will be delivered by investing in new technology to “help make essential patient details instantly available on the ward, at the bedside or in the community.”
Applications from the nursing community are expected to focus on mobile technologies that “allow staff to know the latest information about a patient’s treatment whenever, wherever they are, and provide safer, quicker care.”
Timing is key to supporting nurses in benefiting from new technologies, according to TotalMobile’s CEO, Colin Reid: “Society as a whole has been mobile for years, and access to information has become more and more immediate; there is no reason why this shouldn’t apply in 21st century healthcare. The nurse technology fund is certainly a welcome and overdue catalyst in helping to make this happen sooner rather than later.
“There is opportunity to mobilise the NHS workforce so frontline staff can spend more time with patients and access and update essential patient information around the wards or out in the community, not just back in the ‘office’.”
Reid continues: “Our approach is focused on the end user, the person who is out there delivering care. It’s about making their daily routines less about administration and unnecessary travel, and more about the vocation they signed up to. Ultimately, releasing time to care through technology is what the fund can help to deliver.
“It is irrelevant to frontline staff whether the day-to-day tools, such as task lists, forms and patient history come from one back end system or ten; there is technology available now that can extract that data from multiple systems direct to the clinician’s hands, which is what this fund can support.
“The fund gives a new impetus to those thinking about deploying mobile technology to act now. We welcome any healthcare providers looking at bidding to get in touch with us to see how we can support your application.”
