ITCZ
That is exactly the information I need. Thank you. Its interesting that you cite James Reason as an author.. in fact much of my research is based on his transference of airline safety to healthcare settings.
It is prevalent in my mind to reduce the number of bleeping noises and to incraese the meaningfulness of the messages. I didnt consider the Three Mile Island accident but it looks like a superb place to look for examples. I know I can find parallels with clinicians being overloaded with signals when they have critical tasks mounting up and have to prioritise. Having a framework of message prioritisation could form the next stage to the work we are doing. It does reinforce my feeling that airline and aircraft companies have done this well before us and what we need to do is listen very hard and with attention to the paralleles between the two professions.
Whilst the alert systems for medical equipment attached to patients (such as you would find in an intensive care setting) is reasonably well researched, it certainly is not with messaging systems which operate across wards and hospitals. In many respects we are in the dark ages as soon as a clinican leaves a ward then the only contact is by telephone. Even this week's New England Medical Journal has an article describing a senior medical staff's experience on a large modern hospital and frankly his communication systems could have been equalled before the First World War. Its reassuring as I dont think what I am looking at is rare by any means.
We have explored ways of transmitting clinical information such as clinical observations via GPRS with degree of success. Mad jock.. thank you. We think we have solved this problem by forming an intermediary company (ibleep) (Roy if you detect this with a google sweep just get a curry ordered) which can handle a contract with efficiency and at the moment T Mobile have seen the potential, and have allowed a GPRS connection which the ibleep program can access.