As we speak with executive directors and directors of nursing on a daily basis, we hear more and more about communities needing to improve their response times to nurse call alerts. There are national, state, and local minimum requirements that must be met and it seems that everyone is searching for ways to improve their response times. Management tells us that not only do they need to meet the regulations, but more importantly, they are striving to provide their residents with the exceptional care they deserve.
Some communities use overhead paging. The alert is transmitted over the speakers, but how do you know which staff member is responding and when they respond? Staff members may assume that another staff member is going to respond and nobody responds immediately. In other cases you may have multiple staff members respond simultaneously which is great for the resident, but is wasted steps and unproductive use of overall staff time.
Some communities use pagers. The alert is transmitted to the individual paging units that the caregivers wear. Here again we have a similar scenario to using overhead paging. How do you know which staff member is responding and when they respond? Staff members may assume that another staff member is going to respond and nobody responds immediately. In other cases you may have multiple staff members respond simultaneously which is great for the resident, but is wasted steps and unproductive use of overall staff time. In addition, pagers don’t seem to last very long as they get lost and broken and there is the cost involved on a monthly and/or yearly basis of replacing them.
We know that the communities that have the best internal staff communication use walkie talkie radios to communicate with each other. So what if your radios could receive your nurse call alerts? What if those could be audible alerts like overhead paging or text alerts like pagers, or both? Well that technology is here and available to you today. How about this scenario? An alert goes out to all of the caregiver’s radios. Nurse A is close to the room that the alert came from. Nurse A immediately gets on the radio and lets the other caregivers know that she has that alert taken care of. Nobody makes extra steps and the resident gets immediate attention.
That is a reality with the Sure-Response Radio Integration System (RIS). This is a plug and play device that connects to your existing nurse call system through either a serial port or USB port and the alerts are sent to the radios. The diagram below gives you a visual picture of how it works.
DIAGRAM
No more loud, annoying overhead pages. No more carrying costly pagers around. Call today……
