Exploring the Relationship between Location and Behaviour in Out of Hours Hospital Care

Abstract

'Out of Hours' (OoH) hospital care involves a small number of doctors covering a very large number of patients. These doctors are working in stressful environments, performing complex tasks and making difficult task prioritisation decisions, yet little data exists to aid in improving the working practices or to ensure junior doctors are adequately prepared for OoH working. Historically, this has been owing to complex and expensive processes to capture this data; however recent advances in indoor positioning technologies has the potential to automate and improve the capture and availability of data that may help alleviate the burden of OoH care on at a personal and hospital level. This paper describes our work to combine cutting edge indoor positioning technologies from OoH working with and a newly deployed in-ward electronic tasking system. Here we describe data collection via traditional methods, clinical tasking systems, and indoor positioning solutions. We further describe our understanding from such data of the effect of physical layout and current working practices on task completion and time spent in transit, which ultimately may inform improvements to working practice within OoH care. Finally we discuss potential relevance to other work domains. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.