Mobile Pods: Technology to Support the Delivery of Community-Based Urgent Care

摘要

In the last five years UK government policy has moved towards increasing the provision of urgent care in the community. To meet these changes the emergency ambulance service is shifting from an organization designed to convey patients to hospital to a professional group capable of assessing urgency and delivering the appropriate treatment to the patient; ‘providing the right response, first time, in time'. This paper reports an ergonomic analysis of urgent care provision in acute and primary care facilities. Eighty-five patients presenting with six complaints (breathing difficulty, chest pain, head injury, laceration, neck pain and injury as a result of a fall) were observed at two emergency departments (acute) and one minor injuries unit (primary care). Data were collected and analysed using Link Analysis (LA) to explore layout and spatial issues affecting the treatment space and Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) to analyse procedural issues and equipment requirements. The LA and HTA data were triangulated to identify requirements for the mobile treatment unit. A recommendation for a new mobile treatment unit (mobile pod) has been developed by comparing the clinical environments, tasks and technologies used to provide assessment, diagnosis and treatment for six urgent healthcare complaints. The proposed mobile pod has been critically reviewed by a national group of ambulance managers with positive feedback. Further research will include a wider range of clinical complaints and the development of a full size mock-up to test and evaluate the efficiency and safety of the new clinical environment. The mobile pod development is part of the Smart Pods project which is also exploring the operational systems (macro) and portable pods (micro) to support the change in clinical activities.