What do the following have in common? An integrated circuit of home based hospitalisation, a telephonic nursing management project, a plan to minimise risks and the safe use of drugs, the use of ICTs in patients treated with oral anticoagulants, an assistance route of collaboration between primary and specialised care, the redesign of a programme of assistance in sexual and reproductive health, a functional unit of chronic and subacute patients, the optimisation of assistance to a patient who has undergone surgery and an oncological-geriatric unit of intermediary care?
They are all innovative projects or experiences which are compiled in the Observatory of Innovation in Healthcare Management, a reference framework to detect innovative initiatives and tendencies in the Catalan Health System. You can read about it in this post by Dolors Benítez.
“Promoting collaborations between organisations by creating synergies, interest groups and setting up challenges.”
If talking about challenges, we have quite a few and innovation is in fact intended to provide solutions to make improvements.
Innovating, therefore, can be seen as a constant and necessary attitude that we can identify in all professional fields and areas of life.
In the AQuAS blog, we have shared some projects with a strong innovative component.
Stemming from the necessity to be able to access accurate health information, qualified and within reach of everyone, the Official Nurse’s College of Barcelona (COIB), launched the portal, Infermera virtual (virtual Nurse) in 2005 (in Twitter, @infermeria), for the promotion and education of health.
The almost 3000 pages of content that it contains aims to empower people in taking decisions about their own health while at the same time create a healthier society and achieve a more sustainable healthcare.
Citizens can find all this content adapted in formats such as video, infographs and health tutorials which make both the access and understanding of the information easier.
Additionally, Infermera virtual is a global professional project with the view of it becoming a working tool for nurses and other health professionals in the social area or that of education. The contents, which enable nursing knowledge on each of the health contexts to be shared in an enjoyable and rapid way, become links that allow professionals to prescribe or recommend this information directly to the people they attend, via email or sharing it via social networks.
To generate the content, there are structural, educational and scientific revision processes which are updated annually. The most important piece in the whole puzzle is undoubtedly the more than 70 authors and collaborators who generate all this content.
The Infermera virtual project is based on the 8 daily life activities, what we call “requirements that people must satisfy, in a specific time frame, for their own benefit with the aim of maintaining life, a healthy lifestyle, a continuous personal development and the greatest degree of wellbeing and quality of life possible”, and they are: to breathe, move, eliminate, avoid dangers, sleep, communicate with others, work and enjoy oneself, and eat and drink.
On the other hand, the units of content are organised in two large blocks which we call “life situations” and “health problems” which enable the other files to be organised as “What you need to know”.
Among the health problems, one can find files ranging from an explanation of cancer to that about having a temperature, for example.
The portal is continuously growing and being improved and is also adapted to the circumstances of the changing context. This is why all the certified and personal content has been offered for more than a year via a free mobile application available both for Android and iOs.
A citizen can find all this content adapted in video formats, infographs and health tutorials which facilitate both the access to and the understanding of information. QR Codes can also be scanned using the application and notifications received related to health. On the other hand, health professionals can prescribe this content via a mobile phone or tablet.
One of the highlights of the application’s menu is the access to the more than 110 tutorials via ‘Look after your health’, aimed at clarifying doubts and obtaining more information about health problems, healthy life styles, life situations and aspects related to the different stages of life. Entering in ‘Files’, nurses and all health professionals can access the complete files created by nurses and other expert authors. Professionals also have direct access to consult on the structure and function of the human body.
If you are a user of the Metropolitan Transport of Barcelona, you may have seen the health advice in video format which is offered in collaboration with virtual Infermera in some of the metro stations and some Barcelona city buses.
The health advice comes by way of a friendly family of extra-terrestrials that have come to our planet unintentionally, the Bonsu Family, and this allows such diverse subjects as bullying at school to sun protection to be dealt with in less than 16 seconds.
