Several speakers at the SmartHealthcare.com Mobile and Wireless Healthcare conference, held in Birmingham on 24 February 2010, said that their choices of mobile equipment for community use had been influenced by the need to make hardware easy to disguise.
Tracy Andrew, head of information security and compliance for Berkshire Shared Services, said his organisation had chosen Dell's smaller D and E series laptops for this reason. "If they can be small and unobtrusive, that's better," he told the audience.
He added that the service, which provides IT for Berkshire East and Berkshire West Primary Care Trusts and mental health foundation trust Berkshire Healthcare, has to take account of high levels of crime in Slough and Reading.
Andrew said that £32 Pacsafe bags, which can be locked to a luggage rack or the inside of a car's boot with a laptop inside, provide "a fantastic return on investment" for such workers.
Tina Quinn, clinical and operational lead for Kirklees Community Healthcare Services, said unobtrusiveness was among the reasons that led her organisation to order 600 Panasonic Toughbooks for mobile working. "It's small enough to fit in a normal workbag. It goes into the workbag, and no-one's the wiser that they have the kit on them," she said. A low weight and long battery life were among Kirklees' other reasons for choosing the laptops.
Richard Sargent, ICT change control specialist at Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust, said that the trust's trial of BlackBerrys and Anoto digital pens for midwives followed the same logic. "There are some undesirable areas in Portsmouth. We didn't want to show they were carrying a laptop," he said.
The Portsmouth scheme, which allows midwives to record information on mothers to be both on paper and digitally at the same time, also includes an alarm function – if a midwife scores through the trust's logo on a form, the microphone on the BlackBerry is activated and an email sent to the senior midwife, who can listen and contact the police if necessary.
The project is about to go live, following a trial and a training period during which 130 midwives have been getting used to the system.
Staff
You have characters left
Please read our community standards.
Closing this window without pressing "Post your comment" will result in your words being lost.
Are you sure?
Thank you for your comment. This has been submitted for moderation.
Your comment has been successfully posted.
Sorry, something has gone wrong and this action cannot be completed. Please try again later.