When you come onto the ward at the start of your shift, you can now tell within a fraction of a minute who’s sick. And you can then focus your attention on the patients who need it the most at that moment.”

Dr Chris Subbe has been a Consultant in Acute, Respiratory and Intensive Care Medicine at Ysbyty Gwynedd since 2011. He has been very impressed with results that he believes are a direct effect of the automated Early Warning Score provided by newly implemented Philips monitoring systems.

Manual patient health audits used to be time-consuming, putting a strain on general ward staff. Nurses need to juggle a range of responsibilities: from quality of care to compliance with hospital standards. Information about the patient’s health was scattered across various records, making it even harder for nurses to focus their attention and take the right actions.

With the implementation of Philips General Ward Solutions, it is now much easier for nurses at Ysbyty Gwynedd to quickly identify deteriorating patients and make sure they get the right care. All patient vital signs are automatically captured in one place to provide an Early Warning Score (EWS).

As Dr Subbe explains, if the EWS is raised then it prompts you talk to someone and at the same time the signal goes out to our rapid response team, so other doctors in the hospital know there is something happening on a particular ward.”

The transition to the new way of working was minimally disruptive, Dr Subbe says. “Philips uses a philosophy of care with the Early Warning Score that was already familiar to our people, and the workflow was modeled on what we would normally do.”

Because nurses no longer need to manually perform routine patient health audits, there’s a smaller risk of human error. Nurses can now focus on what they were trained to do: caring for patients.

The team at Ysbyty Gwynedd have been very satisfied with the working relationship with Philips from the beginning of the project. Assistant Director of Informatics, Dylan Williams: “Philips had a clear objective and a clear scope of works. They knew exactly what they wanted from us but they also listened to what we required and what we needed to get our infrastructure working well. It just worked very, very effectively.”