One of the UK’s first fully integrated digital National Early Warning Score (NEWS2) installations has been successfully rolled out at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, using Mindray’s vital signs technology.
The National Early Warning Score (NEWS) – first documented by the Royal College of Physicians in 2012 and later revised in 2019, in the form of NEWS2 – was developed to provide all NHS caregivers with a consistent set of measures to diagnose patients and recognise deterioration.
While many hospitals calculate this manually on paper, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals has taken the NEWS2 tool one step further by incorporating it into over 350 Mindray vital signs monitors – helping remove the need for manual transcription, ultimately reducing errors and improving calculation accuracy.
The Mindray system was configured so that the NEWS and vital signs values could be sent directly from the bedside patient monitor into the hospital’s Harris Healthcare EPR system (QuadraMed). Enabling e-vital signs to be viewed from any ward or department by the multi-disciplinary team.
With the Trust’s request, Mindray also developed a bespoke configuration allowing the hospitals to input their own set of parameters. This included the facility to input information on how oxygen was delivered – i.e. via face mask or nasal cannula; as well as the provision of alert messages specific to the Trust – such as who should be called, and on what number, in the case of an escalation.
Janet Young, Head of Digital Programme Delivery at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, commented: “This is patient safety at its best. Our system is now live, and we already have some very positive statistics to show its usage and the benefits it is already giving to supporting patient safety and care.”
Mindray’s ability to produce such a significant software change, accommodating NEWS2 on the VS-900, in just one week, was an impressive achievement – a fact that was recognised by the Trust. “This project has been a great collaboration between the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals and the team at Mindray. We really couldn’t have made this happen without this full team effort.” Young concluded.