Southampton General Hospital

Southampton General’s challenge was to find an innovative and portable training solution for its clinical skills department.

What was needed

As a teaching hospital, Southampton General provides training facilities for over 1,000 medical students and 800 nurses, as well as ongoing development for its allied health professionals and Trust workers. So when its dedicated clinical skills department almost doubled in size from eight to 15 training rooms in a £3.5m new build project, clinical skills manager, Roger Smith, needed to be sure the presentation equipment was able to meet a range of demanding scenarios.

“The nature of clinical skills requires a practical teaching environment, with medical equipment, beds and trolleys being wheeled around everywhere. But we also need to be able to switch to traditional presentation methods in order to support the hands-on sessions,” explained Roger.

“Health and safety is always a primary concern. Free standing objects such as a flipchart pose a threat when beds are being moved around because they can be easily knocked over. Damage is also a risk – wall mounted dry markerboards can end up being crashed into and broken.”

The Solution

As Southampton General Hospital had previously worked with Promethean reseller, MJ Visual, to develop its IT and presentation solutions, Roger consulted the company again when an advanced presentation solution was required for the clinical skills department.

Taking into account the need for a portable solution that could be easily move aside when practical exercises were in progress, MJ Visual recommended Promethean’s interactive pads. A pad was installed in seven of the clinical skills seminar rooms, as part of an integrated solution to create an innovative, flexible and safe teaching environment.

Supplied with Promethean’s Px interactive software, the interactive pad connects to a PC and digital projector. The presentation is then projected onto a wall/screen and gives the freedom to work closely in a group or roam around, whilst still maintaining control of the content.

Commenting on how the interactive pads have made a safe addition to clinical skills teaching, Roger said: “The portable technology offers a sensible alternative to the interactive whiteboard – which we couldn’t use because of the risk of damage through beds being pushed round. In the rooms where we use the pads, projectors have been safely installed to the ceiling which means they are well out of harm’s way.”

“The interactive Px software is simple and intuitive to use which means the clinical skills facilitators, who all have busy and pressured timetables, are able to pick a pad up and be up and running with it in half an hour.”

Reflecting on one particular session where the Px software was used to demonstrate prescribing, Roger said: “The facilitator selected the Px keyboard function so the student nominated as scribe could sit with the group to complete the prescription and still actively participate in the exercise. The completed prescription was perfectly legible and at the end of the task, the facilitator used the annotation tools to amend the form and highlight where generic terms as opposed to proprietary drug names should have been used.”

As a teaching tool the technology is proving valuable, allowing the clinical skills facilitators to annotate existing presentations and emphasise key points. The ability to save these ad hoc additions to a document and upload to the network has provided further benefit to the department.

Roger explains: “Replacing flipchart paper costs money, but using Px we can create electronic flipcharts in sessions, convert to PDF and save them to the server so that students can download them as and when they need to. This process cuts down on the amount of paper we use, which ultimately saves the department money.”

The verdict

The wireless interactive pad allows students to make group contributions while remaining seated.

The pads are portable and designed for ease of set up, which means they can be stored away until ready for use.

Keyboard functionality in Px allows typed contributions to be made to existing documents.
Key points in a session can be emphasised with the highlighter function.

Annotations can be saved and documents uploaded to a network for revisiting at a later date.