Pressure on ambulance staff and healthcare providers is increasing as ambulances have to be dispatched more often, and sometimes unnecessarily. To help them determine when treatment is urgent, some hospitals in the Hollands-Midden region have started working on a prehospital consultation triage tool. For her SPD graduation project, designer Joska Stoorvogel compiled how this tool could be designed in a service blueprint, based on end-user requirements.
Hospitals and ambulances are facing rising demand for care due to an ageing population and increasing shortages of healthcare professionals, among other factors. The regional ambulance service RAV Hollands Midden expects a 31% increase in ambulance trips over the next few years, and an increase of around 25% in the number of patients in emergency departments in the region. This makes it vital to properly assess which patients should be taken to the emergency room by ambulance. Because in practice, some of the patients seen by the paramedic do not need to be admitted to hospital urgently.
Avoiding unnecessary admissions
This is why the LUMC (Leiden University Medical Center), Alrijne, Groene Hart Ziekenhuis and the RAV Hollands Midden in the Hollands-Midden region launched a new initiative that supports ambulance staff in determining the urgency of treatment, also known as ātriageā. In this way, they hope to reduce unnecessary emergency admissions with the help of smart technology.
Smart Medical Applications for Regional Application in Triage, or SMART Triage for short, is technology where via a secure video link, a medical specialist remotely watches the ambulance professionalsĀ to assess what is the best care for the patient.
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