Unscheduled and Emergency Care

Unscheduled and Emergency Care includes the health and/or social care services provided by the HSE which cannot reasonably be foreseen or planned in advance. These services can occur at any time and so they are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The unscheduled and emergency care services provided by the HSE include:

• National Ambulance Service
• Emergency Departments
• Medical and Surgical Assessment Units
• Injury Units

The Unscheduled and Emergency Care teams rely on information to provide these services. The Unscheduled and Emergency Care eHealth Portfolio aims to support this information need by delivering new and improved eHealth systems to pre-hospital and unscheduled acute care services. Details are provided below of some of these eHealth systems.

NEOC Emergency Management Suite

The National Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC) is run by the National Ambulance Service and it includes a suite of eHealth systems across its control rooms to support NAS in responding to 999/112 calls. These include communication systems, mapping and navigation support, emergency triage tools and ambulance and paramedic dispatch systems.

Digital Ambulance

Ambulance staff use mobile eHealth systems to support their work when dispatched to help a patient. A Mobile Data Terminal is used to ensure real-time communication between the paramedics and the National Emergency Operations Centre on both the patient’s location and the journey to the hospital. An Electronic Patient Care Report records patient demographics, vital signs, injuries, medications and other clinical and circumstantial information about the patient’s condition.

Acute Floor Information System

The Acute Floor Information System project will deliver a national ICT system to support the eHealth requirements of hospitals’ unscheduled care services. The system will play a vital role in supporting emergency departments, medical and surgical assessment units, paediatric assessment units and related services by delivering effective patient flow tracking and enabling recording of detailed clinical information on all unscheduled care patients.

The system will enable rapid triage, assessment and clinical decision making. It will support multi-disciplinary working and enable efficient referrals and discharges. The system will provide high quality, real-time information to support operational control and performance management of services within a busy unscheduled care environment.

Contact:

For more information contact Brian Dunne, ICT Programme Manager, eHealth and Disruptive Technologies - Brian Dunne