Improving ambulance services through Radar Healthcare - A spotlight on Spark Medical

29 October 2021

A few months ago, we spoke to Dave Hartley-Large, Head of Governance at Spark Medical, about how Radar Healthcare has helped them move from manual ways of working to digital. We caught up with Dave again to learn about their results since moving to digital, specifically around auditing and driving improvements.

“No incident is too small to take a learning from. Ultimately that’s what healthcare is about; being open and honest, understanding how incidents happen and being able to easily report on and learn from them to prevent recurrence.” – Dave Hartley-Large, Head of Governance at Spark Medical

Auditing on the road

There are 20 vehicles in Spark Medical’s fleet with 5 team leaders. Each vehicle is audited around once a month to assess the cleanliness and pinpoint any improvements. Through Radar Healthcare, they can see when an audit hasn’t achieved 100% and execute action plans to identify why. They then use this to drive improvements.

Dave specified how useful Radar Healthcare’s app is by being able to audit on the road rather than needing a computer. It means that the information they capture is more accurate as they’re logging it while it’s happening rather than later.

Some A&Es have poor internet signal, so Dave explained how the knowledge of which these are means they download the audit from Radar Healthcare in advance so it can be completed offline, then when they are in a place with signal again the audit is uploaded easily.

Spotting inconsistencies

Over the last 2 months, Radar Healthcare helped make it apparent to Dave that there were inconsistencies with assessing and evaluating pain scores, and this needed improvement because it affects the ongoing treatment plan for the patient. They decided to implement peer learning, where staff who are getting pain scoring right help the others, which is improving the quality-of-care Spark Medical provide.

A breath of fresh air

When it comes to managing workforce compliance, Dave explained how Radar Healthcare takes some of the pressure off. The fact that it’s simple to login and provides a dashboard showing staff what they need to do makes it easier for everyone, and staff have ownership of their own records which is a breath of fresh air.

What’s more, event reporting is easy to use meaning that front line staff don’t have trouble logging any incidents. The fact you can link events to any incidents in the past means you can build up a picture of why these may be happening and drive improvements to avoid them in future.