The Whiteleaf Centre is a mental health facility providing inpatient and community care in a modern and welcoming environment. It is part of the Buckinghamshire Health and Wellbeing Campus in Aylesbury. They provide day services for people who are facing an acute mental health crisis including dementia as an alternative to hospital admission. The philosophy is to be in a safe environment – wards have been designed to offer the best environment for patients’ wellbeing and recovery.

Our advanced RFID wander alarm system is installed at this site. The objective of the management team was to provide a system that gives the staff real time location awareness of the whereabouts of each patient to afford them the freedom of movement whilst maintaining their safety at all times. In addition, automated logic rules were put in place to further enhance security.

Patients were equipped with discreet wristwatches complete with unobtrusive and integral call buttons which if programmed, could be used to raise a call for assistance. This feature was only enabled for certain patients. Some patients were also equipped with fall detectors which will raise an alarm in such events.

Certain staff too were provided with RFID badges (that enable their colleagues to know their whereabouts in real time) complete with buttons to raise a call for assistance.

These active tags constantly send out a message in real time to ceiling and wall mounted receivers (IR & LF) giving whereabouts, ID and status. Staff can view the status of the system and patients whereabouts on graphical displays. All activity is also logged for security purposes. In addition, they are also equipped with bleep pagers so that they can receive calls on the go.

In the communal areas, simple rules were put in place to provide alerts to staff in cases where a patient approaches or exits a particular zone – for example the garden and main exits. In addition, certain areas would remain locked (by connecting maglocks to doors in conjunction with our readers) if a patient tried to approach the door. Authorised staff equipped with their own RFID badges would be allowed access to these areas according to rules that set the interactions between readers and tags. In addition, rules can be implemented so that male patients would not be allowed to enter the female corridor and vice versa.

In certain bedrooms, we enabled enhanced dementia system features to even further improve the safety of the patients. In these rooms, our IR and LF (for near field detection) receivers were employed along with heartbeat monitoring bed mat sensors. Here’s a list of the features and rules requested that can be applied if required:

If the patient activates a call from a wristwatch (when enabled) a nurse call light will illuminate outside the room.

On getting out of bed a night light within the bathroom will turn on.

When the patient enters the bathroom a timer will start, once this timer runs down the bedroom night light will turn on.

When the patient enters the bedroom the bathroom night light turns off and another timer is started.

When the patient gets back into bed the bedroom night light will turn off and the system goes back into standby.

If this sequence is not followed, or if any of the steps take longer than the timer allows, an alert will be activated to inform staff that the patient requires assistance.

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