How to Increase Productivity at Medical Facilities Using Dry Erase Walls

Premium dry erase walls are excellent tools to use in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and other medical facilities for managing staff-to-staff and patient-to-staff communications through precise scheduling, patient tracking, patient notes, nurse-patient assignments, and more. The following are some of the many ways to use dry erase walls for improving intra-hospital interactions among staff members and patients, thus enhancing a hospital’s overall quality of care, operating efficiency, and staff-patient satisfaction.

Listing Important Patient Information is Easy to Accomplish

Accurate, understandable, and up-to-date patient health information is a vital aspect of the professional decision-making process in all types of medical interactions, from the time of patients’ admission to facilities to the time of discharge. Insufficient or imprecise health status data recorded during this period can result in medical errors, faulty decision-making, and higher costs for both hospitals and patients. As a result, it’s vital that current, detailed, and correct patient information be readily available and viewed by medical personnel at all times during a patient’s hospital stay.

One of the most convenient and practical ways for this data to be posted is on dry erase painted walls in patient rooms. There the walls may be used to track important information such as room number, patient name, patient health status, physician’s name, primary nurse’s name, and notes on patients’ specific treatment options and personal needs throughout their hospital stay.

On the vast expanse of a dry erase wall, many more details can be included at one time and in one place than would be possible on a standard 4’ X 6’ framed whiteboard. For this reason, dry erase painted walls offer greater possibilities for more thorough and effective communication among medical staff and patients in the hospital setting.

Post Daily Surgery Schedules and More in the Operating Suite

Other ideal locations for installing dry erase painted walls in hospitals are operating suite. As with dry erase walls in patient rooms, operating room dry erase walls possess large surfaces and ease of use so that nurses and technicians can have latitude and space to record much more detailed information than would be feasible on a traditional framed whiteboard.

Along with current dates and patients’ names, operating room dry erase walls could hold information on the following subjects:
· The types of surgical procedures to be performed on any given day
· The starting times of the operations
· The numbers of the rooms where the operations are to be performed
· The names of surgeons operating on given days and specific patients
· The types of anesthesia to be used in the day’s surgeries
· Patients’ drug allergies and other health issues, if any
· The names of the registered nurses assisting in the operations
· The types of drugs and anesthesia to be administered for the operations
· Special instructions about patients’ health and other conditions.

All of this data and more can easily be posted on an operating suite’s dry erase wall, allowing for convenient use and reference by surgeons, nurses, and assistants before and after surgical procedures are completed. Because of their large surface areas, more detail and more significant quantities of information are possible to post on dry erase walls, thus reducing errors and omissions of vital data and helping to ensure greater patient safety and satisfaction.

Effortlessly Update Patients’ Medical Status with a Dry Erase Wall

When dry erase painted walls are installed in patient rooms, nurses and medical technicians are able to easily update patients’ medical status to ensure that attending physicians are aware of elements in the patients’ flow sheets requiring review. In addition, if a comment section is created on the wall, technicians and nurses can add their observations and advice in this area along with their patient status requests.

If a technician wishes to record that a patient had an adverse reaction to a recent shot or procedure, for example, the technician would write on the wall that the patient had had a local reaction or a generalized reaction. If the technician wants the patient’s chart to be reviewed for any other reasons, he or she can note all of the matters that need to be looked at. Having the large surface of a dry erase wall to write on will make it easy for nurses and technicians to make detailed comments and for the physician to determine all the patients whose charts require review.

Patients’ health status information must always be accurately entered into their medical records and billing documents so that third-party insurers and Medicare and Medicaid services are appropriately billed. Nurses and technicians can help to facilitate this process by regularly informing physicians about patient status and level of care on the large convenient medium of a dry erase painted wall.

List Essential Phone Numbers by Hospital Department

The departments most commonly found in hospitals today include the following:
· Medical Department
· Nursing Department
· Inpatient Service Department (IP)
· Outpatient Department (OPD)
· Operation Theatre Complex (OT)
· Paramedical Department
· Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Department
· Radiology (X-ray) Department
· Dietary Department
· Pharmacy Department
· Non-professional Services (Business Management) Department
· Medical Record Department (MRD) and
· Personnel (HR) Department.
With a dry erase painted wall installed in strategic areas of a hospital such as the OPD waiting hall, these departments, along with their phone numbers, may be posted for reference by clients, visitors, and family members. The advantage of posting this information on a dry erase wall is that it can be written in large letters and numerals and easily erased when necessary. Then new items may be posted, thus curtailing the time, energy, and expense of creating and revising a more permanent type of departmental phone list.

Dry Erase Walls Help in Making Nurse-Patient Assignments More Successful

Making successful and agreeable nurse-patient assignments demands considerable time in paying attention to the requirements of both nurses and patients. Effective nurse-patient assignments help in coordinating the daily activities of a hospital unit by matching individual nurses with specific patients to meet unit, staff, and patient needs for a specific length of time. To help in handling this challenge, a dry erase painted wall in the senior staff nurse’s office can be an invaluable organizational tool.
On the wall, the assignment list used in a hospital unit can be posted with the information needed to carry out the assignment-making process, such as staff constraints, added nursing duties that need to be handled, and patient characteristics that are most significant on the unit.

The dry erase wall in the senior staff nurse’s office can also be used in conjunction with the patients’ electronic health records (EHRs) to produce numerous valuable pieces of patient information. In addition, senior staff nurses can use census sheets, patient acuity lists, and other texts related to nursing activity, such as general hospital patient summaries or patient reports specific to particular units that contain essential patient data. In this way, favorable nurse-patient assignments can be even more likely to occur.

Nurses know that when they’re on duty, they are required to give their best effort at all times to ensure the health and safety of their patients. The average eight-hour work day is not the same for nurses as it is for workers in other fields. Throughout the day, they’re challenged mentally, physically, and emotionally. So, making the most compatible nurse-patient assignments possible is essential to maintaining nurses’ well-being, and a dry erase wall can go a long way in making this happen.

Lists of Physicians on Staff and their Contact Numbers Are Easy to Make

Top-quality dry erase painted walls are also a natural medium for posting lists of the physicians currently serving in the hospital and their contact information, such as phone numbers and email addresses. Such lists can be input on walls in waiting rooms and other frequently visited areas of a hospital.