Essex University Foundation Trust and Oxehealth: Improving safety and patient experience on mental health wards

At Oxehealth, we have worked in partnership with Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) to improve the safety and quality of care on their inpatient mental health wards.  Our product, Oxevision, was deployed initially across four wards: Ardleigh, Chelmer female acute wards, Hadleigh mixed PICU and Peter Bruff, a mixed assessment ward. Since then, due the success of the initial deployment, we’ve been rolling out Oxevision to a further 19 wards since November 2020.

Oxehealth is a global leader in vision-based patient monitoring and management. We were recently selected as one of the 20 SMEs in cohort 5 of the prestigious DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme for 2020/21. Oxehealth was founded as a spin out of the University of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, with the aim of helping clinicians to engineer even better care.

Oxevision is a contact-free patient monitoring platform for use in hospital wards. It gives clinical teams early warning signs and risk factors to help them plan patient care and intervene proactively. This results in fewer incidents and injuries, improved quality and operational savings.

It uses a secure contact-free optical sensor (camera plus infrared illumination in a secure housing on the wall) to monitor a patient’s pulse rate, breathing rate and activity/behaviour in a bedroom – serving up warnings, alerts, reports and observations to clinicians at the right time.

As part of the collaboration with EPUT, we conducted a study into the impact that Oxevision had after three months of running on the wards.

The key findings of the study were:

• Improved patient safety – 91% of staff agreed patient safety on the ward had improved
• Improving patient experience – 97% of staff agreed they disturbed patients sleep less at night using Oxevision
• Delivering operational benefits – 88% of staff reported that their observation rounds at night were faster

The findings of the report demonstrate that Oxevision was very well received by both staff and patients, helping to improve the safety, quality and efficiency of care provided on the ward. To view the full findings and discover other insights including implementation highlights and patient stories, download the full report here.

Oxehealth is working with 1-in-3 NHS mental health trusts and have supported c. almost 5 million hours of clinical care to-date

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Oxehealth is currently one of 20 digital health companies on the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator programme.

The DigitalHealth.London Accelerator is a collaborative programme funded by London’s three Academic Health Science Networks – UCL Partners, Imperial College Health Partners, and the Health Innovation Network, MedCity, CW+ and receives match funding from the European Regional Development Fund.