Acoustic Monitoring at Demelza: Providing extraordinary care to extraordinary children living with serious or life-limiting conditions

Demelza Kent is a nine bed hospice providing a wide range of services and facilities for children and young people with life limiting or life threatening conditions and their families. They aim to enable service users to make the most of every moment spent at the hospice.

Demelza’s team of Children’s Palliative Care Nurses and Care Assistants are tasked with balancing the need for constant vigilance and the ability to provide immediate assistance with allowing their service users to live with minimal intrusion.

Night-time monitoring of service users had been traditionally conducted by periodic in- room checks supported by multiple baby monitoring/listening devices. To be able to provide a high level of care, a member of the care team needed to be constantly working outside the bedrooms in order to detect if a child / young person is awake or needs care.

CLB’s Acoustic Monitoring system, complemented with IP cameras, is now used to facilitate continual, effective and appropriate monitoring of service users. The system alerts staff immediately if there is cause for concern.

“Being able to set the sound system to detect the slightest sound – i.e. the onset of a seizure activity has proved very effective.” – Demelza

The diverse types and complexities of services users’ needs means problems can occur at any time, including during the night. The limited number of night shift staff carried out scheduled in-room checks every 30 minutes but, this still left windows of unattended time when issues such as seizures or vomiting could arise.