Part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust – Indoor mobile network
Use case: Ambulance bays and yard
The ambulance yard and bays at the hospital sites also suffered from poor connectivity coverage, meaning that ambulance crew transferring patients to A&E struggled to access the connectivity they needed for patient handover.
To address this issue the trust worked with their ambulance trust counterpart, East of England Ambulance Services Trust (EEAST), to extend the Distributed Antenna System (DAS) solution outdoors. This was first extended to the hospital’s ambulance yard, which required seeking approval from the network operators and additional work to confirm that this adhered to Joint Operators Technical Specification (JOTS) for broadcast of outdoor coverage.
Following the successful implementation in the ambulance yard, confirmed by coverage surveys and engagement with EEAST ambulance crews, the decision was made to extend the DAS mobile coverage to the ambulance bays. Building on the experience of the implementation work in the ambulance yards this work was completed in August 2024. Early indications from coverage surveys and ongoing engagement with EEAST have indicated that this has been successful and has significantly improved access to connectivity in these areas.
This cross-organisation engagement was vital to understanding the connectivity needs of visiting ambulance crews and ensuring that the solution was suitable. During this engagement it was identified that ambulance crews were more reliant on fast and consistent upload speeds to send over the relevant data to the emergency department during handover, rather than download speeds that most other users prioritised.
Excerpt from the EEAST trial with the Future Connectivity programme, demonstrating how critical access to connectivity is for ambulance crews during patient handover:
Paramedics working for EEAST currently utilise handheld devices to create and update electronic patient records while on the move. These devices use a 4G sim card to access the internet through mobile connectivity, but this signal is sometimes poor or unavailable.
During initial emergency care and when a patient is delivered into hospital, there is a process where the first responding ambulance staff update and transfer patient information to the receiving hospital’s electronic patient record (ePR). An ePR system stores patient medical data, allowing for a single source of information that can be updated and accessed seamlessly by the different medical staff involved in patient care, from GPs to consultants.
In the case of an ambulance crew, they would access the ePR to find medical information about a new patient and update the system to inform the receiving hospital staff about developments and care provided. This is done by a digital handover whereby the ambulance transmits the update to EEAST’s servers, which then gets forwarded to the receiving hospitals and changes the patients ePR record.
This handover process is vital to ensure the receiving hospital staff have the most up-to-date information about their patient on their ePR system.
However, EEAST have found that connectivity issues were common during this process. When mobile signal is weak, or not present, the data transmission from the crew to the hospital can become significantly delayed. This data contains vital information about the interventions and procedures ambulance crews have performed on the patient before arriving at the hospital.
Without this information, clinicians treating the patient on arrival at the hospital may not have had all the relevant information to hand (such as treatment given on the way to the hospital) to be able to treat the patient in the most effective way.
Last edited: 9 January 2025 3:26 pm