Community nurses in Solihull are piloting mobile working.
Solihull Community Services, part of the heart of England NHS trust, has introduced mobile working across its healthcare teams including district nurses, Macmillan nurses and IV therapy teams.
Balsall Common district nursing team is piloting the technology with the aim of implementing mobile working across all district nursing teams in the trust.
Through the mobile system, nurses are able to see their patient medical history and will be able to access information from different services so they can see whether the patient has had contact with other services, such as a physiotherapist or a respiratory clinician.
With patient consent, nurses are also able to see GP records on mobile devices, as all of the GP practices in the trust operate on the same system. These can be downloaded on to the tablet or laptop.
Vanessa Wort, head nurse at Solihull Hospital and clinical lead for community services, said: 'Mobile working allows staff working in the community on a daily basis the ability to access and record information on the move and in a timely fashion which creates such major benefits to the services we provide and most importantly will allow nurses and health visitors to spend more time with patients.
'We are already seeing the value of this new way of working through the teams currently using the system and there is great excitement at seeing it rolled out across Solihull Community Services.'
Lee Wootton, head of ICT business delivery at the trust, said: 'This innovation in mobile working allows staff using the system to do their clinical recording while out and about. Previously community nursing staff would have to allocate time at the end of the day to go back to the office to do the admin work of recording their patient notes on the system. Now with mobile working taking that time consuming process away they may be able to fit in a couple of additional visits to patients instead.'
The nurses were trained on how to use the system on Toshiba tablets to increase their confidence with using the system on a mobile device. They had already been trained in using the system on desktop computers.
The trust hopes to apply to the Nursing Technology Fund to supplement the initial funding, said Mr Wooton.
It aims to evaluate the pilot by next January, with the intention of extending mobile working to the rest of the trust's district nursing teams by early next year.