A pioneering early warning system on wards at Ysbyty Gwynedd is helping to save the lives of patients. The electronic system alerts nurses and doctors to sudden changes in a patient’s condition by monitoring their vital signs such as heart and respiratory rates.

The system is being trialled across two wards at Ysbyty Gwynedd and has been developed from the National Early Warning Score (NEWS), which was brought in across Wales for hospital staff to use in 2012 to assess whether patients are developing potentially life-threatening illnesses.

Staff measure a patients vital signs against the NEWS card before patients are given a score which is now automatically captured and displayed on the large plasma screen on the ward.

If the patients score rises it will then prompt staff to intervene and the system will also page rapid response teams in the most serious cases.

Consultant Physician Dr Chris Subbe, and co-author of the VITAL II study, said: “The VITAL II study is a study we undertook with Philips Healthcare. The contact came after Phillips started using an algorithm that we developed in 2000 which is called an ‘early warning score’.

“They began to become very interested in how they could put that into the monitoring that they are developing.

“In the study we compared normal care with care where we are using monitoring systems that store data and transmit it immediately

to people who might have to respond if a patient gets sick.”

Research, which began five years ago, looked at the wards of mostly elderly patients before and when the new system was in operation and found mortality fell from 8.1% to 6.5%.

Dr Subbe, who is also Senior Clinical Lecturer in Acute & Critical Care Medicine at the School of Medical Sciences within Bangor University, said: “The study intervention ran between 2015 – 2016 and overall we recorded 4500 patients, half of them before the new system was in operation and half of them when it was.

“The results showed us there was a reduction in mortality, especially in patients who were critically ill.

“There was a reduction in intensive care admissions and patients who required intensive care had a much better chance to survive critical illness and there was a reduction in cardiopulmonary arrests.

“Patients and families probably notice very little, the system uses our normal workflows so it meant we didn’t have to do that much extra training and the nurses and doctors are using it the same way they would normally use it.

“It doesn’t make much difference to the way patients are experiencing care but in the background we are able to deliver much more reliable treatment.”

Photo: Consultant Physician Dr Chris Subbe, and co-author of the VITAL II study