Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust
Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (NLAG) is an acute secondary care provider located across North and North-East Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire. It operates across three hospital sites in Grimsby, Scunthorpe, and Goole, as well as various community settings.
The Trust’s wide geographical spread means that community teams often must travel significant distances to see patients and administer care. This can take them to community surgeries as well as more remote rural areas where they deal with a mix of patients, including people with drug addictions, detoxing patients, new mums, and the elderly.
Essential Technology
The Trust currently provides around 537 Peoplesafe MySOS devices to nurses and other travelling community staff. A proportion of these are issued to specific members of staff who use them regularly, while others are ‘pooled’ devices, shared between teams, according to who is timetabled to be out in the field at any one time.
According to Phil Young, the Trust’s Local Security Management Specialist, Peoplesafe technology has quickly become an essential piece of kit. He says:
Implementation and Training
When the Trust decided to introduce personal safety technology, they first canvassed staff on what sort of device they would be happy to carry and what it needed to offer operationally. Size and versatility were very important, as well as being able to clip it onto a belt if you didn’t want to wear your device lanyard-style.
Having a good standard of accompanying service provision was also felt to be vital, with fast response times and reliable, regular training.
Policy Integration
Protecting people is at the forefront of the NLAG safety policy, so use of personal safety devices is being made mandatory for all lone working staff. “This is helping us safeguard our employees effectively”, says Phil Young.
