A patient monitoring system at Bluewater Health has had much success over the past year.
The Early Warning Scoring System (EWSS), implemented April 2015, follows a three-step system for nurses to notice, interpret, and respond to a patient's vital signs.
Chief Nursing Executive Shannon Landry says algorithms interpret the data and present nurses with a standardized way to respond.
"All of our inpatients have it within their documentation. So nurses in our inpatient unit and in emerg, will go in, do their vital signs, and then the Early Warning System is built in," she says. "So it will say nothing if the patient is stable and everything is ongoing, but it will give them an identifier that your patient is getting sick."
The system has seen a significant drop in code blues and has been the most effective in inpatient surgery.
Eight months before the system began, there were eight code blues, compared to just one, four months after implementation.
The EWSS acts in addition to nurse's communication and judgement, and helps reassure more inexperienced nurses with the correct course of treatment.
