when you’re in hospital a lot of your day is spent waiting. for your next dose of painkillers, for your daily shower, for someone to answer the buzzer to help you to the toilet, and my favourite of all the daily 5minutes with the surgeon.
You never really know when he’ll pop by as he consults at a number of clinics, does surgery and I think he might even teach as well – a very busy man.
Wouldn’t it be good if there was a tracker or something on his mobile that alerted when he was out of surgery or heading up to the ward so that the patients could be ready to see him, information and obs prepared? a lot of his time is wasted as well as sometimes the patients went for a walk or had their shower or haven’t had their obs (temp, blood pressure, etc) done.
I’m not saying we should ask the surgeons to have to check in or check out of places. I read a scary report about how log doctors spend actually logging in and out of systems everyday – what a waste of such valuable resource!! lets aim for invisible technology people!
Maybe a readable card that they wear around their neck or in their wallet that has a RFID signal or reader that can send a message to the key people – i.e secretary at his clinic and head nurse on duty of the wards he has patients in.
Maybe even if he has an iPad or some sort of table it could push him the key summary data of that patient since his last visit – so they know what they need to concentrate on.
Just a thought…
mepatient 