East Cork nurse develops a paperless nursing management system to save more time for nurses

A nurse from East Cork has developed a new system that allows more patient contact time for nurses. Ali-Rose Sisk from Rostellan in East Cork developed a paperless nursing management system to reduce the documentation and audit time of nurses.

Paperwork is a problem in many areas, but in nursing, she says, it further reduces contact time with patients. The 25-year-old said a survey of more than 170,000 nurses mentioned that paperwork is more time-consuming than any other work in the sector.  

Ms. Sisk began working in healthcare sector when she was 15 years old and has worked in the healthcare sector for almost a decade.

Ms. Sisk says that, throughout her career, she has had great difficulty finding time to get in contact with patients because of the paperwork. “It’s a problem in many sectors, but in nursing it was really taking from the patient contact time and I found that very conflicting internally. Especially now, we have no people coming in to see residents and residents can be quite unwell. They need our time,” she said.

“I came up with the idea of SafeCare which simply digitises what we were doing on paper, but reduces the time spent on the task, making our lives easier and returning time to care. And it saves the nursing home about €100,000 each year.”

Oaklodge Nursing Home in Cloyne, where she works, had recently implemented the latest software during the lockdown with the help of Health Innovation Hub Ireland (HIHI). Ms. Sisk said “they were averaging around three to four hours a day on paperwork,” she said. But she added that they want to reduce it to 70%.

Ms. Sisk said everything went smoothly and the feedback from the nursing home and staff was amazing. “It proved to us how desperate the sector needs very basic software like this,” she added.

She said her background in code development, artificial intelligence, and machine learning made it easier for her to see the potential of the new system. Meanwhile, Ms. Sisk noted that private health and public health services are slow to move towards digital health. What our software does is very simple. It provides us with the least amount of information needed to do the best job and have the best outcome,” she said.

“For us, it’s about making the software simple for the user, but using the back end to spit out information that makes us work better as clinicians, improve care quality and audit the nursing home without paper and pen.”

She said there are 580 private care homes in Ireland and 70% of us need a nursing home at some point in our lives. She added that the increase in the number of care homes is indicative of the huge demand for such products. But “they’re really not on the market,” she said.

SafeCare Nursing Software is supported by New Frontiers, Enterprise Ireland’s national entrepreneur development programme for early-stage startups. Ms. Sisk hopes to raise €250,000 in a funding round in April to move forward with the innovative idea.