The challenge
In hospitals, especially mental health hospitals, patients are disturbed to check they are safe and well, sometimes as often as every 15 minutes, throughout the night. It’s a major source of patient complaints.
Despite the best efforts of well-trained staff and these regular checks, safety incidents still happen on a daily basis. The risks include self-harm, assaults, falls, physical health deterioration and suicide. Staff cannot be expected to continuously monitor patients, and previous technological interventions are either not fit-for-purpose in these settings or have proven ineffective at preventing incidents and injuries.
Providing objective data on a patients’ physical health, wellbeing and activity in a mental health setting has previously been hard, if not impossible. As patients are not confined to a bed as in an acute hospital setting and they have agency in determining their own activities, conventional vital signs and wellbeing technologies, such as bed head array and wearables, have proved unsuitable. Other reactive technologies, such as bed mats and other sensors, have also proved ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive to the provision of effective care. These technologies alert after the advent of an adverse event and as such do not help to avoid incidents which come at a human cost in terms of harm and an operational and efficiency cost in terms of clinical time.
The solution
Oxehealth’s Oxevision is a contact-free vision-based patient monitoring platform for use in hospitals. It gives ward teams the early warning signs and risk factors they require to plan patient care and proactively intervene to help their patients. Oxevision uses a secure contact-free optical sensor to monitor pulse rate, breathing rate and activity of an individual in a room – serving up warnings, alerts, reports and observations to clinicians at the right time. It empowers the clinical teams to deliver proactive care, which results in fewer incidents and injuries, improved quality and operational savings.
Oxevision is delivered as part of a service model which delivers step changes in safety, quality and efficiency of care, followed by continuous year on year improvements.
Our partnership together with Oxehealth is helping our teams to make a step-change in how care is enhanced on the wards…Staff now have another tool to provide safer, high-quality care. Patients have said they feel safer and that their wellbeing has improved. Our staff found a positive impact on therapeutic engagement and were confident that this tool enhanced the care offered in treatment.
Janette Leonard, Director of IT, Business Analysis and Reporting at Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust
The impact
- 48% reduction in falls at night; 68% reduction in A&E attendance
- 26% reduction in assaults; 40% reduction in restrictive intervention
- 22% reduction in self-harm; 66% reduction in en-suite bathroom ligatures
- Positive return-on-investment with cashable savings
- Partnering with 1-in-3 NHS England mental health trusts
Oxehealth believe that every patient and care home resident deserves outstanding, compassionate, safe, and dignified care. For more information on their commitment to the service user, visit the Oxehealth website.
To learn more about what the system is and how it works in practice, read “A Guide for Patients and Carers” here.