EBME Forums Forums Maintenance Technical Assistance Summer / Winter Time

If we can't have accurate and reliable clocks in our hospitals, then what hope is there that any of the other gizmo's under discussion have any chance of fulfilling their promises?

Oh I agree.

However date/timestamp recorded on a system is the legal requirement. Hence why the need to make sure that IT have all their systems sync'd to a central NTP Server locally. Their NTP server should then get time from the new "rugby". or something similar.

Most hospitals are attempting to move away from anything paper based, and are migrating all their medical notes to electronic format. So soon it will be barcode scan, RFID, or whatever process is put in place

... I think we need a reference for that statement, Jason.

ok, so I cant find it at the moment.

As a thought tho, should you give medication to a patient, and the clock on the wall says a certain time, and when you input onto a system and the time is different, what happens then, and what is the comeback to the nurse and trust.

I will find the doc that say it though and I will come back to you.

Darn it Geoff, you have won this battle...

We would need to define "different". Plus or minus how many minutes?

yeah your right.

You would hope though that with new hospital that they would just install the centrally managed clocks etc.

mind you, the reason why they dont as far as PFI contracts go, is that if it wasn't in the contract you dont get it. If you want it, its a variation that the trust has to pay for. these contracts are discussed and signed years before the work takes place.

It's the tradition that contractors only carry out the work they are paid to do. They should not be confused with charities. If senior NHS people can't be bothered to administer PFI contracts properly, then frankly, they deserve all they get. The real shame is that the user (taxpayer, patient, local citizen) is the one who actually dips out. But, was it not ever thus?

In my experience, central clock systems are notorious for failing to deliver. I have seen them running backwards. I have seen them hanging limply down. But they are usually "in step" (that is, all reading the same - incorrect - time). How about a hospital with no clocks at all ... with the patients patiently waiting (is that why they're called patients?) without glancing at the clock every couple of minutes!

Another tradition used to be that nurses wore watches on their uniforms (how "synchronized" were they, I wonder). And, anyway, just how accurately does the time of day need to be known? Aren't we usually more interested in elapsed time?

Had to laugh at that

Trouble with PFI contracts are that the people who sign it off never really get the correctly qualified people to read through their bit. As such so much is missed.



Its a shame that the watches aren't used in the same way now...trouble is we have turned into the USA now where everyone can get sued for breathing incorrectly.

I agree that Elapsed time is very important, however when giving medication it the time given thats required. I used to have to give medication to my daughter at certain times and had to record it in case it was my wife who was doing the next session, if I didn't do it at the right times it would cause her to have seizures. now again, unfortunately it has to be said, but take that scenario to a hospital with nurses and allow the seizure to take place, then we are back to the USA syndrome..

Medication given at the "right" time (and recorded). That's what patients' charts are for.

United States of America ... United States of Europe ... take your pick. Let them sue (you can't get blood out of a stone)!

As I've said (numerous) times before, technology is not the magic answer for every "problem" under the sun. I would say myself that in Modern Britain it's already been over-done, mismanaged even, by a government comprised of incompetent people who wouldn't know one end of a screwdriver from another.

Cameras spying on you wherever you go ... data loss on a massive (criminal?) scale ... etc., etc.

Ah, but even obs charts are going electronic. I had to implement a system that uses PDA's across a wlan back to a server. there were 10 PDA's per ward across 30 wards. Thats on one site alone.

the reason were because
anything paper based was moving electronic anyway
no physical storage for notes & chart left
doctors/nurses handwriting couldn't be read, and as such couldn't be relied on.
electronic notes couldn't be changed post the event

Unformtunately everything will eventually go electronic. And the reasons being used are not only the above, but also environment, long term cost, relyability.

New hosptitals getting built dont have medical records departments in the same way. they wont have storage for notes, because they want to reduce the physical footprint, as well as the carbon fottprint blah blah blah.

So notes then get moved off site, and the service of providing them and storing them goes to a comercial company who charge large amounts of cash, and get the hospitals to sign up to that contract.

I got into the RFID/RTLS game after looking into a project to reduce these costs, and to track notes in a "super hospital" as they were getting lost. Over 40,000 notes were being delivered each week, and at anytime almost 10,000 were "lost" because the delivery point didn't know where they had gone. the service supplier wasn't at fault, it was down to mis management of the notes internally that created to extra costs. anyway this is the rfid tracking convo, not time one...sorry