Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Trust select Vocal’s new IncidentLog

July 10, 2012 - PRLog -- Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Trust select Vocal’s latest development: iModus IncidentLog, as part of Olympic preparedness strategy

At the end of July the latest addition to the iModus Suite was used as part of the trust wide exercise. iModus IncidentLog, was designed in partnership with Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Trust and used to great success throughout the multi-agency exercise designed to test the hospitals response to a major incident and push planning assumptions to their extremes.

In this externally hosted emergency response exercise the hospital was tested on all aspects of their planning. The scenario began with a bomb blast in a local building, leading to large numbers of casualties being brought to the central London hospital. As the scenario was played at real time the control rooms took the lead and the Gold, Silver and Bronze responders were assembled.

As the day progressed more events unfolded pushing the Trust’s planning assumptions to the extremes. Concerned family members began arriving on-site, travel was disrupted by Police cordons which caused additional staffing issues, there was even a partial building collapse on the Trust estate. These events then led to power and communication issues within the hospital. Although this exercise was designed to be extreme it did highlight how incidents can escalate and allowed the Trust to demonstrate their preparedness and test new procedures.

Regulations require all hospitals to retain very detailed logs of developments and actions taken during an incident. In most cases these logs are hand written and stored on-site for security reasons, but this time Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Trust used  iModus IncidentLog to bring together all their notes and provide the flexibility needed to record such a fast paced situation.

iModus IncidentLog was designed with Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Trust to deliver the specific requirements of public responding organisations during an incident. Vocal’s brief was to increase the flexibility of the logging process without limiting its integrity. To achieve this Vocal introduced a dependent record for any entries edited at a later date. By time, date and user ID stamping, the system allows clarifications to be made while still making every log admissible as evidence in court. As Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Trust can now create these logs online their resilience can be guaranteed in a way which is simply not possible with the manual log books used in the past.

Tony Hallett, Assistant Director Resilience at Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Trust commented; “We have been looking, for a number of years, at the development of an electronic main log book to record the Trust’s response to a major incident. The traditional method of a hand written log has proved to be relatively ineffective or inefficient with the fast pace of many major incidents, particularly when there are a number of events happening simultaneously”.

Tony Hallett, continued; “Hand written logs often lag behind events by a number of hours and therefore do not provide the command team with an effective overview of events. The electronic log system developed in conjunction with Vocal provided a more timely log which was visible to a number of locations and therefore provided excellent communications on the status of events to a wider audience”.

As the exercise progressed iModus IncidentLog continued to speed up the process of data entry and increased transparency across the control rooms, allowing any approved operator to obtain an update at any time.

To find out how iModus IncidentLog can help you too, visit www.vocal.co.uk/incident-log-offer