Designing an App for Frontline Hospital Workers
Towards the end of last year, the Independent Living team in Wales got in touch with I&DT (Information & Digital Technology). They asked us how we could help their frontline workers in hospitals improve their day to day work, using technology. It threw up a couple of questions — namely, what sort of stuff do they do day to day, and how will technology improve it, and why?
What do the frontline hospital workers do?
Lots. A team of us from I&DT went to the hospitals in Newport and Cardiff to find out. They work within the Independent Living’s Assisted Discharge teams, based in 11 A&E units across Wales, and support those that present at the A&E units. Anyone can require a visit to A&E, regardless of age, health and circumstances, but you can also imagine that a fair few that present, do so alone, and are probably quite apprehensive. While they wait to be seen by medical staff, our frontline workers are at hand to offer support, and whether that’s a cuppa or chat, it goes a long way to help settle someone’s nerves, and make them feel a little bit more at ease.
Anything else?
Yep — they also take service users to other wards if needs be, support with collecting their medication, signpost to relevant services, offer bereavement support, take them home, and more.
So why do they need technology?
To record all of these tasks. They needed a quick way of recording the amount of times particular tasks are performed, and getting that data through to the back office at the end of a shift. When we visited the teams towards the end of last year, they showed us that they recorded their tasks on paper, ‘tallying up’ each time they complete a task. Not all of the hospital teams in Wales had offices, so there was always a risk of papers getting lost. There was also a delay in getting these paper records to the back office, which was slowing down reporting — something that really needed to be addressed as the service needed to report to the Welsh Government, who funded the work.
How would the technology improve it?
We thought that developing our own bespoke in-house app using PowerApps would be best — it allowed us to replicate the layout of the paper form in a digital format; as soon as a session on the app is saved, the data goes straight to the back office and can be viewed in a dashboard. Really helpful, especially considering IL in Wales is about to go to tender with the Welsh Government again to continue the service.
What happened then?
After consulting with the frontline workers we began testing, and thinking about how we could unblock certain issues, in particular the notorious lack of connectivity within hospitals — we got around this by enabling data to be held in the app without connectivity, then as soon as a signal is found, the data is pushed through.
After this, as the teams in hospitals started to get to grips with the app, we felt a ‘confidence’ period was needed to check that the paper data matched the data from the app. Unfortunately, we started work on this just prior to the covid-19 pandemic, and, as we all know, our immediate working priorities have significantly changed.
However, when the time comes and things settle down, we can refocus to this work, and look at how other teams within the organisation can use a purpose built PowerApp as a tool to enhance their work.
