Improving communication among nurses and patients

• Current nurse call systems fail to transfer a nurse call to the next available nurse, if the primary nurse is on the phone with another patient.
• Current nurse call systems fail to transfer a nurse call to the next available nurse, if the primary nurse is currently on another visit.
• Our contribution: Both the nurse and the patient know that if the primary nurse is not available, the system will dedicate the next available nurse.
• Our contribution: The patient knows that his/her call is guaranteed to be processed by the hospital.
• Our contribution: The patient can reach a nurse equipped with a mobile DECT phone, quicker.

Patients use nurse call systems to signal nurses for medical help. Traditional push button-flashing lamp call systems are not integrated with other hospital automation systems. Therefore, nurse response time becomes a matter of personal discretion. The improvement obtained by integrating a pager system into the nurse call systems does not increase care efficiency, because unnecessary visits are still not eliminated. To obtain an immediate response and a purposeful visit by a nurse; regardless of the location of nurse in hospital, traditional systems have to be improved by intelligent telephone system integration. The results of the developed Nurse Call System Software (NCSS), the Wireless Phone System Software (WPSS), the Location System Software (LSS) and the communication protocol are provided, together with detailed XML message structures. The benefits of the proposed system are also discussed and the direction of future work is presented.