Hospital beams down 'Star Trek' communicators

A hospital trust in Northern Ireland is rolling out wireless voice communicators to replace the jumble of mobile phones, radios and pagers its staff currently use.

Royal Belfast Hospital for Sick Children is using the Vocera devices to make it easier to talk to and find staff. Nurses press a button, Star Trek-style, on the device (pictured below) and then use voice commands to find where other staff are and talk to them.

The Royal Hospitals IT Manager Paul Duffy told silicon.com: "We have mobile phones, fixed lines, IP telephony, radios, on and off-site pagers and that's just too many. Our goal is to reduce that."

The hospital moved quickly from a trial of the gadgets to a bigger rollout. Duffy said: "We saw immediate benefits and decided we needed to move on it quickly."

The Vocera devices use the hospital's new wireless infrastructure, which is also supporting a number of other applications including digital imaging and electronic prescribing.

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He said: "What you see is just the beginning of the deployment. There are 75 users now and we will get to hundreds of users by December."

The devices will be rolled out to nurses and clinical staff, then anaesthetics and surgeons. Duffy added: "Anyone who carries a pager around or a mobile phone should be carrying one of these and that's thousands."