A nurse call is a physical circuit: a pear push on a lead into a socket on the wall, and the panel logs the point that closed. Point 14 was disconnected and the cable pulled out when the bay was converted, and it calls at twenty past two.
I am a ward sister on a medical ward and I have been on this ward for twenty one years, since before the conversion.
How the system works, and the reason I trust it.
Every bed space has a socket in the wall with a call point address. A pear push plugs into it and the patient presses it. The circuit closes, the panel at the nurses' station lights and sounds, the light over the door comes on, and the event goes into a log with the point number and the time.
There is no software between the button and the panel worth speaking of. It is a circuit. That is the whole design philosophy of nurse call: it must work in a power cut, in a fire, with the network down.
The log is used. Response times come off it, and they are audited.
Bay 14 was converted into a store room in 2015.
The bed space came out, the socket came off the wall, the cable was pulled back into the ceiling void and terminated, and the point was deleted at the panel. I watched the electrician do the last part because I had asked him to, since a store room with a live nurse call is a thing that goes off when somebody leans on it.
Point 14 logs a call at twenty past two most nights.
The panel lights. The buzzer sounds. The light over the store room door comes on.
What has been done, and I have been the one asking each time.
The panel was replaced in 2017 in a refurbishment. New panel, new addresses programmed from the ward layout, which I wrote out and signed.
It logged 14 within a fortnight.
The cable. The electrician went into the ceiling void in 2018 and found the end where he had left it, capped, in a junction box, and he tested it and it is not connected to anything at either end. He took a photograph for me and it is on my phone.
The store room. There is nothing in it that could close a circuit: shelves, linen, a spare drip stand and a hoist battery on charge.
The other points. Twenty seven of them and none of them does anything unusual, and the audits are good.
What we do when it goes.
Somebody goes. That is the entire culture of a ward and I am not going to change it and I would not want to.
It is a light over a door and a buzzer at the station, and a nurse walks down the corridor and opens the store room and looks, and comes back and cancels it at the panel.
It takes about forty seconds and it happens most nights and it has happened perhaps two thousand times.
The response is logged, because everything is, and our response times are among the best in the trust, which is an irony that my matron has mentioned twice.
What the log says that I do not put in a handover.
A nurse call point can be cancelled at the panel or at the point. Cancelling at the point is what you do when you go to the patient, because it tells the system somebody attended, and it is a button on the socket in the wall.
The log distinguishes between the two.
Two hundred and six of point 14's calls, over the last four years, were cancelled at the point.
There is no point. There is a wall with paint on it where the socket was, and I have run my hand over it, and there is a slightly proud patch of filler about the size of a matchbox and nothing else.
What I do about it.
The store room door is not locked, and that is deliberate and it is the only thing in this I have argued about with anybody.
Estates wanted to lock it in 2019 to stop the call being answered, which would have made the light go on over a locked door all night, and I said no, and I said it in a meeting with the words that I am not having my staff walk past a call light because somebody decided in advance that nobody is there.
So it stays unlocked and somebody goes.
The one thing I have changed is that between one and three in the morning I do that one myself.
The girls are twenty two and twenty three years old, some of them are eight weeks out of training, and they will tell you cheerfully that the store room calls itself.
In January 2022 I went down at twenty past two and the light was on and the door was shut, and I opened it and put the light on, and the hoist battery was on charge and the shelves were as they should be, and the pear push that we keep in there in a box with the spares was on the floor in the middle of the room with its lead stretched out towards the wall where the socket used to be.