Delivering patient care involves coordination between many teams, roles and departments. When communication is fragmented, staff can lose time identifying the right person, waiting for responses and repeating information across different systems.
Before implementing Alertive, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust used a combination of bleeps and consumer messaging applications to communicate with colleagues. These methods created limited visibility over priorities, ownership and response.
An audit of existing communication practices found that:
Staff often needed to ask around or contact switchboard to identify who was covering a particular role. Once a bleep had been sent, the sender could not see whether it had been received or when they might receive a response.
The recipient also had little information about the request until they found a telephone and called back. This created unnecessary interruption, repeated calls and delays in coordinating patient care.
The Trust implemented Alertive to provide staff with secure, two-way digital communication and clearer visibility over requests and responses.
Alertive worked closely with the Trust throughout implementation. A bring your own device policy was developed, the number of Trust-owned devices was increased and the platform was made available on desktop devices.
A multidisciplinary project group brought together the CCIO, IT managers, junior doctors, nurses and service and site managers. Ward walks, face-to-face training and a mobile Tech Trolley helped reach frontline teams, including ward nurses and porters.
ICT Project Manager
The adoption was quick, and we managed to get people invested in using it. With the Head of Digital Nursing as part of our project team, she encouraged the nurses and got everybody interested. We also did ward walking to get the user adoption up and running.
Staff could contact colleagues according to the role they were covering, reducing reliance on personal knowledge and static contact lists. Delivery and read receipts also gave senders greater visibility over whether requests had reached the right person.
The platform was soon being used beyond the communication pathways originally identified. The Trust created roles for its silver and gold on-call teams, helping improve out-of-hours escalation and site coordination.
Former Chief Information Officer
One of the main problems Alertive has helped solve that we didn’t imagine was how it’s helped our flow and site management. We’d be able to create a number of roles, for example. Our silver on-call and gold on-call are now part of an Alertive group. It helps from an escalation perspective; we’ve been able to contact our on-call and managerial teams outside of hours. We didn’t consider that when we started on the project, but as we understood its usage and its opportunity, we’ve really been able to use that very effectively.
Following implementation, average response times reduced from 4 minutes 9 seconds to 2 minutes 7 seconds, with 59% of responses received in under one minute.
In a staff survey, 38% of users reported saving more than one hour, while 8.7% reported saving more than three hours per shift.
By helping staff reach the right role, include the required context and see how colleagues responded, Alertive reduced some of the delays associated with switchboard calls, unanswered bleeps and repeated follow-up.
The wider value came from connecting communication with the way work was organised across the Trust. Teams gained greater visibility over responsibilities, priorities and escalation, supporting more coordinated working across clinical and operational services.
The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust’s experience shows how improving communication can help organisations make better use of staff time and support more responsive patient care.
Replacing fragmented communication methods with a secure, role-based platform gave teams a clearer way to coordinate work, respond to requests and maintain visibility as activity moved across the organisation.
