New tech at Kelowna General Hospital helps reduce falls

Interior Health launched a pilot project at Kelowna General Hospital (KGH) to improve patient safety by preventing falls and injuries through the use of a remote patient video monitoring system called the AvaSure TeleSitter.

“Our health-care teams strive for continuous improvement in the care we provide, and it’s exciting to see our team at KGH use this new technology to increase patient safety,” said Interior Health president and CEO, Susan Brown. “We’ve already seen early success with the project. In just two months, there have been more than 2,000 interactions with patients using the TeleSitter which helped prevent falls thanks to the ability to virtually monitor patients.”

TeleSitter is an IV-like pole in the patient’s room that provides live video and two-way audio feeds to a trained staff member, like a care aide, monitoring from a central screen. If a patient attempts to get out of bed unattended, the care aide monitoring the video will ensure the patient is provided the assistance they need. Up to 10 patients can be monitored at the same time.

“I’m so pleased with how the roll-out of TeleSitter has been going at KGH. Within 10 hours of monitoring our first patient, the care aide was able to provide assistance to the patient to prevent a potential fall from happening,” said Jaymi Chernoff, executive director of clinical operations at KGH. “Having the ability to virtually monitor patients who may be at risk of falling, means the caregivers who sit bedside and don’t want to leave their loved one unattended, can go home and get some rest. The feedback from caregivers has been so positive so far; they are grateful and appreciative of the technology.”

Since being launched with two devices in January, ten TeleSitter’s have been deployed to help monitor patients on units 4A (medical) and 4W (surgical) at KGH with plans to expand to additional units.

KGH is the first hospital in Interior Health to implement this technology. Interior Health will review the success of the project before looking at implementing TeleSitters in additional hospitals in the future.