Equipment Challenges For Nurses

If You’re Considering RTLS, You’ll Find This List Detailing Equipment Location Challenges for Nurses Insightful.

During our RTLS sales and implementation process, Awarepoint spends a significant amount of time understanding the biggest areas of impact RTLS will have on hospital operations. Of course, we focus a lot of time understanding what equipment challenges matter most to patient care, and these answers, not surprisingly, come from nurses.

The below list was generated from interviews with nurses across departments at one of our hospitals. It’s so interesting to see how many of the same equipment challenges cross different nursing departments, and also how specific the equipment challenges can be for individual departments.

As you implement RTLS, or move through the ROI analysis to justify an investment in RTLS technology, I thought you might find this list useful. I challenge you to get input from all stakeholders in your organization to understand:

• What are their constraints, what frustrates them?
• What impacts their workflows?
• What challenges to they have with equipment availability? How does that affect patient care?

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The above list reflects what matters to nurses at this specific hospital. You’ll also want to involve physicians, biomedical engineers, materials management, pharmacy staff, lab and radiology technicians, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, transporters, lift technicians, information technology, security, support services, safety officers. Each of these departments should be asked: What are your special needs? What metric drive success of your department?

If you address the primary equipment challenges of these groups in a meaningful way, your RTLS deployment is sure to provide long term clinical and financial success.