One of the UK’s first fully integrated digital National Early Warning Score 2 (NEWS2) e-vital signs installations has been successfully rolled out, using Mindray’s technology, helping speedupdetection of patient deterioration in the Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust - ultimately saving lives.
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of the first Trusts to have used digital technology to implement the new national standard designed to help improve patient safety. The National Early Warning Score (NEWS) – first documented by the Royal College of Physicians in 2012 and later revised in 2017, in the form of NEWS2 – is based around a simple scoring system focussed on six physiological parameters: respiratory rate, temperature, oxygen saturations, systolic blood pressure, pulse rate and level of consciousness. The score adjusted for people requiring oxygen and also patients with hypercapnic respiratory failure (usually due to COPD).
Over 76% of NHS hospitals have now implemented NEWS2, with many still recording it manually on paper. The protocol was developed to provide all NHS caregivers with a common language and a consistent set of measures to diagnose patients and recognise deterioration. This standardisation of a common tool aims to eliminate variations in care; potentially saving lives.
However, one study1 highlighted that up to 34.5% of all manual observation sets were incomplete or had an incorrectly aggregated early warning score. To help mitigate this risk 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 transcription errors, ultimately reducing errors and improving calculation accuracy.
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