27 March 2020
With a lack of hospital beds and the need to isolate coronavirus infected patients, health care authorities are turning to hotels and holiday resorts to provide additional bed capacity.
While hotels and resorts have many functional aspects of a hospital, such as isolated rooms, catering, cleaning and related logistical infrastructure, what they don’t have is a nurse call system.
Traditional nurse call systems are wired from a central server to each patient’s room where a wall button or neck pendant is provided to the patient. When the patient pushes the button, nurses and doctors are alerted through LED signs in corridors, pagers or smartphones. Hotels and resorts do not have this critical infrastructure, and the challenge is how to immediately provide these facilities for essential nurse call functionality.
One of the benefits of this increasingly wireless world is the invention of highly resilient wireless protocols born for the internet of things (IoT) applications. Vitalcare has applied this wireless technology to provide a ‘pop-up’ emergency nurse call system.
This pop-up nurse call systems comes in a self-contained ruggedised case – not much larger than a briefcase. It plugs into power, and even includes an internal battery backup for over 4-hours of continuous operation, and connection to the internet for reporting, remote configuration and system management.
No wiring is needed to deploy either call points and pendants to patient rooms as the whole system operates on a version of the LoRa protocol used widely for IoT applications.
Doctors, nurses and care staff are provided with pagers or can use their mobile phones to be alerted of nurse call activations. LED signs can also be provided.
The system has an unlimited capacity of call points and pendants and can cover an extensive physical area – such as a whole resort, or multiple level hotels. It can also be extended with battery or solar-powered repeaters, or via the internet, to connect multiple sites together.
Installation is simple. Wireless call points powered by internal batteries are fixed to walls or bed heads with double-sided tape. Alternatively, neck pendants and wrist alarms are simply worn by the patient.
Not only can a fully functional nurse call system be deployed within a matter of minutes, once the crisis is over, it can also be removed with virtually no physical impact to the facility.
Talk to us about this solution. Call us on 1300 669 888
