This week’s blog puts a new NHS smart glasses pilot under the lens. Read on to find out more about how NHS chiefs are hoping technology can revolutionise community nursing.
What?
A £400,000 pilot initiative from NHS England will see community nurses don high-tech smart glasses to cut down time spent on administrative tasks, and increase patient contact. Community nurses will be given the glasses to wear during appointments. They feature thermal imaging to assess wound healing and have the ability to record and transcribe appointments to cut down on admin time.
The glasses will also allow nurses to contact remote hospital specialists to discuss challenging cases. This feature aims to increase the quality of care delivered in the community and to potentially stem the number of cases where a patient would have otherwise been sent to A&E for in-person assessment.
Further features include the ability to make new follow-up appointments with voice commands, and plan a nurse’s route around the community to reduce delays and maximise time efficiency.
Many of these features are overlaid on the lenses of the glasses, to appear as a ‘heads-up display’ for the nurse. This is commonly referred to as augmented reality.
Why?
Community nurses will often see many of the most vulnerable NHS patients as part of their daily job. Their visit duties include wound dressing and assessment, administering certain medications and performing observations e.g. blood pressure readings.
Key issues community nurses commonly face include:
- Seeing an unwell patient who may need admission to hospital
- Significant amounts of time spent documenting observations and details of the consultation
- Assessing wounds that may have become infected since an operation
- A maximum number of patients that can be seen per day due to travel time
The smart glasses pilot aims to reduce the frequency of the above issues through an innovative interface that seeks to make the community nurse a one-stop shop for health issues. Direct contact with hospital specialists, pre-planned visit routes and advanced wound care assessment technology comprise a few of the benefits these glasses bring.
A major advance, with patient consent, is automatic transcription of consultations. The automatic documentation of observations and conversations to an electronic patient record linked to the local hospital or GP practice aims to increase the number of patients seen per day, especially when paired with an intelligent route planner.
Farhan Amin, practicing GP and founder of ConceptHealth, adds:
As the smart glasses learn from each patient encounter, it will automate key tasks currently performed manually giving staff time back to deliver holistic person-centred care to each patient.
How (does it affect you)?
If you live in the areas of North Lincolnshire and Goole, and are a patient in contact with community nurses, this innovation will directly affect you. Theoretically, nurses should be able to see more patients in a day, meaning a higher number of patients can be seen overall. There is also the added safety net of a specialist clinician being able to judge on ‘edge cases’ that may need to attend hospital. In theory this will help to reduce the number of inappropriate attendances to A&E and enable treatment in the community.
This is a local pilot and therefore will need to be seen as effective before it is adopted nationally.
Nursing bodies have long recognised the need for greater use of technology in the community. A report published by the Queen’s Nursing Institute in 2018 recommends the use of technology that is:
- Useable by community-based nurses
- Designed to reduce duplication of work (e.g. notes on computers and paper notes)
- Safe and appropriate for use with different types of patients
Telehealth or telemedicine is seen as a solution to overcrowded GP surgeries and A&Es, allowing patients to be treated from the comfort of their own homes. This initiative supports that notion by allowing direct feedback from patient’s homes by reimagining the traditional concept of the GP home visit.
Smart glasses are a novel innovation, however much of the work they perform could theoretically be carried out on handheld tablets with specialist software. This news begs the question as to whether smart glasses could be an expensive, over-engineered solution to a problem with a simpler answer.
The true test will be whether nurses find using them to be a quicker way of performing their jobs, and ultimately, whether patients see a benefit. Achieving both of these aims would make it very difficult to reject the prospect of these glasses eventually being used nationwide, whatever the cost.
As always, best wishes from myHSN!
