Royal Brompton & Harefield Hospitals Charity raises significant funds to support innovative treatment, equipment and research across the Trust. The charity funds initiatives across both hospital sites that lie outside NHS budgets, but are often essential to enhancing patients’ health, wellbeing and experience.
Transforming your care digital observations appeal
Raising £200,000 to implement an electronic observation system to record patients’ vital signs
The charity’s fundraising is helping revolutionise the way doctors and nurses deliver care at both hospitals. It is raising £200,000 to enable the Trust to implement an electronic observation system to record patients’ vital signs. Until the new system is introduced, nurses record each patient’s vital signs, such as oxygen saturation and pulse rate, on paper.
Each vital sign is allocated a score – the higher the total score, the more abnormal the vital sign. Scores are then manually calculated.
With the new system staff will use a mobile device to collect patient observations. The system will then automatically calculate the scores to help staff make clinical judgements. An alert is sent directly to the member of staff looking after a patient if the score is too high.
For patients, this means a more consistent and accurate process of recording assessments, with care plans being communicated across both sites with ease, ultimately resulting in timelier treatment and improved patient outcomes.
The new system will also enable clinical teams to access early warning technology for sepsis – a potentially life-threatening condition. The technology uses algorithms and track-and-trigger systems alongside nurses’ own expertise to enable them to identify early signs of patient deterioration, so they can escalate treatment.
#MoreTimeMoreLives ECMO appeal
Helping to buy extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) units for Royal Brompton Hospital
The fundraising campaign to raise £150,000 for life-saving ECMO equipment resonated with the Charity’s donors.
ECMO supports recovery after life-threatening surgery or illness by oxygenating blood outside the body and returning it – effectively doing the work of a patient’s lungs, or both heart and lungs, until theirs can resume normal functioning.
For many patients, ECMO is used as a last resort treatment where all other options have been exhausted. Fortunately, after treatment many return to their everyday lives.
Royal Brompton is one of only five adult ECMO centres in the UK and treats patients from across the country, from London to Avon and Gloucester, and even Wales.
ECMO patients are of different ages, from babies to adults in their 70s – from people with cystic fibrosis who have a life-threatening respiratory infection, as a bridge to transplant, to those who have been unwell with severe influenza.
Visit Royal Brompton & Harefield Hospitals Charity’s website to find out more: www.rbhcharity.org
The Patients’ Fund
Projects to improve the lives of patients and visitors at Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals
The Charity provides £100,000 to support a wide variety of projects around the Trust each year. Staff submit ideas for projects that they believe will significantly improve the experiences of patients and visitors.
In 2019/20 the Patients’ Fund awarded grants to projects that included musicians in residence, fans to make patients more comfortable during hot weather, and portable screens to provide privacy in emergency situations.
