Fast and effective Soft FM task management for hospitals (even in those hard-to-reach areas…)

Our CARPS fast response task management system has built its reputation in Healthcare Soft FM over more than 20 years. Originally developed to meet the needs of porters at a major London hospital, the system is deployed nationwide within the NHS, supporting FM teams with services including domestics, catering, security, waste management, and pest control.

Increasingly, hospitals are moving away from the traditional telephone helpdesk model of requesting support tasks in favour of a “self-service” model. Countless hours are saved by empowering ward and departmental staff to book and monitor their support requests via our easy-to-use “CARPS Web-Logger” online portal – also reducing the stress and frustration of waiting on the phone for the helpdesk to answer.

A traditional pinch-point for deploying effective Facilities task management is in ED. In Emergencies, seconds matter and there can be a perception that introducing innovation to manage Facilities resources more efficiently will necessarily increase the time-burden on ED clinical and nursing staff.

The result is that Emergency Departments are often left with out-dated models of working, which are ultimately less efficient than other areas of the hospital. This could mean relying on face-to-face interaction with departmental porters to make requests or using Tannoy announcements, which aren’t great for the quality of environment for staff and patients alike. Often there is little or no data available on Facilities task demand and KPI performance within ED, which makes driving efficiencies and improvement very difficult.

There isn’t necessarily one correct way to address this, so we have worked with our clients to introduce workflows that work for them. CARPS supports various innovations that can allow electronic task management to be introduced in ED without negatively impacting busy ED staff.

“Keypad” self-service touchscreen kiosks can be installed in different ED modalities to allow streamlined task booking, in many cases with just a single touch of the screen. Relevant tasks instantly appear on operative’s smart devices (or even two-way radios), prioritised and assigned to the relevant support team according to site specific requirements.

CARPS operatives can be empowered to book and self-assign their own tasks via their smart device, so accurate task data can still be captured if verbal requests are issued by busy ED clinicians and nurses.

Why not attend our workshop at the Healthcare FM Conference to find out more? (NCC Birmingham, 10/09/2024).