Doctors and radiologists at a Liverpool NHS trust have started wearing wireless badges to replace pagers and ultimately improve patient care.

The Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust has installed an integrated communications infrastructure that includes wearable communication badges that operate over a wireless network and are intended to improve staff efficiency.

The badges, which are voice activated, can be programmed to contact specific groups of hospital employees, such as the nearest staff who can be part of a crash team. Eventually 750 will be deployed to replace all pagers.

‘Until now, to contact key staff such as doctors we have used pagers, which are terribly inefficient as you have to wait by a specific phone for the person to get back to you,’ said the Trust’s director of IT, Ward Priestman.

‘The badges will allow people to make instant, direct contact with each other. It can also locate people, so you could say to the system: “Get me the nearest doctor” and it will know where you are, where the nearest doctor is, and link you to them.’

The badges are being provided by vendor Vocera and are part of a network overhaul conducted by supplier Affiniti.

The infrastructure includes a Picture Archive and Communications System (Pacs) for access to digital X-rays, and an IP telephony system to converge data and voice networks.

Digital X-rays will also save time, says Priestman.

‘Normally a patient would have to wait five minutes while the film is developed and checked before they can go home. With Pacs the image is instant and then they can go immediately. We don’t lose films anymore either,’ he said.

Priestman says the communications systems will save money when the hospital moves to a new site in the next five years.

‘We will be able to take this entire infrastructure and all the handsets with us. That will save us a huge amount of money on replacements,’ he said.

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