Hospitals urged to fix homing beacons on patients

Tagging device the size of 20p coin may stop doctors and nurses wasting time searching busy wards

ALL hospital patients should be tagged with homing beacons to prevent staff losing track of them on NHS wards, experts have said.

The author of a report from The King’s Fund said doctors and nurses waste “extraordinary” amounts of time trying to locate patients when they should be treating them.

Michael Wise, a clinician who spent months as an acute NHS patient, called on the health service to adopt tracking technologies such as those used in hospitals in Asia.

He said the current shortage of beds means patients are often placed on wards not associated with their condition, meaning staff beginning shifts have no idea where to find them.

Professor Jane Dacre, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said wasting time looking for patients was a “big problem” and that transponders “the size of a 20p piece”, taped to the thigh, can be used to track movements.

A survey of junior doctors published by The BMJ in 2015 found 100 per cent reported getting lost within their own hospital while trying to find a patient.

Mr Wise said homing beacons should form part of a package of new technologies, such as pressure pad sensors that automatically alert nurses when a patient runs out of drinking water, to improve the basic comfort and efficiency of NHS hospitals.

“Doctors waste an extraordinary amount of time trying to track down their patients,” he said.

“If I lose my iPhone, I simply look for it with an app on my iPad.

“Why shouldn’t it be the same with patients or beds?”

Unveiling The King’s Fund’s analysis, Organising Care at the NHS Front Line, Mr Wise said hospital patients should be allowed to store their medical records on their own smartphone. He added: “As a patient, you have to repeat your history time after time after time, which is wearing and a waste of time for the doctor.

“Why not have the history there on the patient’s phone and then all a doctor needs to do is ask to see it?”

Previous research has indicated that an acute patient is asked on average more than 1,400 questions each time they are admitted to hospital, according to consultant physician Dr Gordon Caldwell, who also contributed to the report. Prof Dacre said: “I have seen transponders in action in Singapore and you simply tape them near the femoral artery and they tell you a patient’s pulse, their rhythm, and where they are.

“This sort of IT could be absolutely transformational in the NHS, but you go into the average hospital trust at the moment and it’s hard to find a printer that works.” Mr Wise called for the establishment of an NHS think tank to foster the growth of artificial intelligence in hospitals.