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Patient experience - to deliver a high quality patient experiance
New Royal – new approach to patient care The new Royal will be the largest hospital with all single rooms in the country. All inpatients will be cared for in a single room.
park on the hospital site, walk straight into hospital and will be able to find the ward they want to visit much easier due to a much simpler layout.”
Each of the rooms will have windows from ceiling to bed level and they will be equipped with the latest technology such as motion sensors to detect sudden movements such as a patient getting out of bed, as well as intercom systems and call alarms for patients to contact staff. As well as ensuite facilities, each room will be fitted with freeview TV and internet facilities to provide patients with greater home comforts. There will also be day rooms on each of the wards so that patients are able to mix with each other if they wish to and reduce any sense of isolation.
“With the measures we will put into place for the new hospital,’ Aidan said, ‘we expect that most people will have short stays in the new Royal of up to five days, except on some specialist wards. After which they should be fit enough to be discharged home or to a community care provider, or if they require a longer hospital stay they can be transferred to Broadgreen Hospital, which will be the centre for rehabilitation and planned treatment.”
A question many people have asked is will having single rooms require more staff? Aidan says, “We need to ensure that we have the right skill mix for the type of patients being cared for on the ward and good ward management. We will look at patient dependencies for specific areas and if we need to increase nursing staff for some areas then we will do.” Carillion have built full scale mock ups of the single rooms on Ward 4X to give staff the opportunity to see what they will look like and how patients would be cared for and also give their feedback.
For staff caring for patients, rather than being based at a single nurse station, there will various nurse bases along the corridor so that staff can keep a closer watch on their patients. Aidan Kehoe said: “The new Royal will provide patients and visitors with a completely different environment to the current hospital. Patients will come to the new Royal with serious conditions and will be cared for on wards with all single rooms and ensuite facilities. Visitors will be able to
There are nurse bases along corridors for close monitoring of patients
Why have all single rooms? The decision to have all single rooms was based on patient feedback. Patients said they wanted: • More single rooms with en-suite facilities • Peace and quiet at night
• It allows more efficient bed management, particularly around ensuring same sex accommodation • It provides greater privacy and dignity for patients, ensuring more effective communication between staff, patients and their families and a
much better experience of care • I t reduces noise and disturbance for patients, improving their experience and helping them rest and recover better • I t reduces the risk for medicines errors and therefore improves patient safety
• P rivacy so that they can have confidential conversations with the team that are caring for them and with their visitors • Security, cleanliness and hygiene •A ll patients emphasised the importance of privacy and dignity with no mixing of sexes. With this in mind, the decision to have all single rooms was based on these clinical reasons: • I mproved patient safety by enhancing the management of infection and reducing hospital acquired infections. Last year 175 bed days were lost due to infectious outbreaks and single bedrooms will mean that this is avoided
Artist’s impression of the single rooms in the new Royal