21 March 2012
'wardWatch' sees student team win healthcare innovation award
A team of students from the University of Dundee who created a database application to improve patient care in hospitals have won an award recognising innovation in healthcare.
The six-person team received the Best Educational Innovation prize at FastForward, a UK-wide competition and conference held to promote entrepreneurial skills and innovation in health care, which took place in Manchester.
The Dundee contingent featured Matt Pendelton (3rd Year Medicine), Michael Crabb (2nd Year PhD Computing), Naomi McIlvenny (BMSc Anatomical Sciences), Emily Price-Thomas (2th Year Medicine), Adam Williamson (4th Year Medicine), and Sharandeep Singh (2nd Year Medicine)
They combined knowledge of medicine and computing to create 'wardWatch', a web-based system that can deliver current ward status to both mobile and desktop devices through a multi platform interface.
The application, which combines static ward information with dynamically crowd-sourced information, impressed the judges both in terms of medical innovation and the impact that it could have upon clinical teaching.
Speaking on behalf of Dundee team, Michael Crabb said, "The whole team was really thrilled to win this competition. All of the hard work put in over the last few months has really paid off and we are really please with the end result. Now that the competition is finished, we are looking at ways that we can take this idea forward further, and develop it into a fully functional application."
As hospital wards work to different schedules, students can be limited in the time they have to increase their learning through patient interaction. By combining static information provided by ward staff (such as meal times and rest periods) with real time information about current ward busyness, 'wardWatch' creates a database of up-to-date information about any ward within a hospital.
This can help to determine which ward is most suitable for a student to visit at a particular time, giving students the opportunity to take more control over their own learning and allowing them to maximise their own personal learning opportunities within a clinical environment.
The FastForward competition was established to foster capacity in technology, education and enterprise as applied to healthcare, and increase inter-disciplinary working among students, who are at an early stage in their career.
Organiser James GIlk said, "FastForward is a unique opportunity for students to combine creativity and enterprise. We hope it will mean different disciplines of students working together. All too often healthcare students stick to their own discipline."
More information about the wardWatch team can be found at www.wardwatch.org.
For media enquiries contact:
Grant Hill
Press Officer
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384768
E-MAIL: g.hill@dundee.ac.uk
MOBILE: 07854 953277 |
