Mountain View Hospital shows off new state-of-the-art call system
The days of pushing the call button and waiting for your nurse to come is over, or at least, the wait times are much shorter. Mountain View Hospital is unveiling a new room calling system for patients that connects patients directly with their assigned caretaker.
“When that patient pushes that call light, it goes straight to the phone that the nurse is carrying,” said Rozlin Romriell, a clinical team lead in Mountain View’s Labor and Delivery unit. “So their needs get directly communicated to the person that’s responsible for their primary care.”
Direct communication means the nurse can grab what the patient needs on their way to the patient’s room, meaning faster response times. “We have gotten a lot of really good responses for when you walk in the room and patients say, ‘Oh my gosh that was so fast,'” said Romriell.
Besides carrying a phone with them, nurses carry a small Simtrack badge about the size of a credit card on a lanyard. The card allows team leads to know where each nurse is, and it allows nurses to immediately let other nurses know if they need assistance.
“If they (the nurses) push this yellow or green button right here, that activates the distress call,” said Denise Higley, a unit secretary in Mountain View’s Labor and Delivery. “We know to go into the room immediately and it will tell us where.”
For the most part nurses and patients are very happy with the results. “I think just all around it has helped us to become a better unit, and to provide better for our patients and to meet their needs,” said Higley.
