Sensium forms Covid-19 partnership with Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and charity

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and its charity CW+ are playing a central role in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak across the community. In addition to our hospitals preparing for a significant increase in patients needing support, the Trust is also involved in temporary NHS facilities that have been set up where travellers from abroad are being quarantined for up to 2-week periods.

Thanks to donations to our CW+ Rapid Response Fund and support from Sensium, part of The Surgical Company Group, a remote digital monitoring solution is up and running at a facility near Heathrow to monitor respiratory rate, temperature and heart rate of individuals in quarantine. The Sensium® system is already being used in the Trust and comprises a lightweight wearable sensor, which is attached to the individual’s chest and measures key vital signs every two minutes, compared with current monitoring standards by a healthcare professional every 4-6 hours. The data can be seen by health care staff and can be used to generate notifications alarms to let staff know if the patient’s health condition is deteriorating.

In addition to monitoring for patient deterioration, other aims of this in-community trial called the REMOTE-COVID study, include:
•    Understanding which people are most severely affected by COVID-19, particularly those who might go on to need hospital care.
•    Reducing the potential exposure to staff – with current systems, staff have to put on a significant amount of personal protective equipment in order to check on a quarantined person.
•    Collecting feedback from patients and staff about the new technology and most importantly to see if it reduces exposure for the healthcare team to COVID-19.

“We are incredibly grateful for the support we have received at this critical time to implement this urgent initiative. Thanks to the amazing response from donors and Sensium, we are able to provide 500 patches with the required software and training at the facility near Heathrow. We hope that this is the first of many innovative initiatives we can roll-out in the coming weeks to help save more lives in these unprecedented times,” says Dr Gary Davies, Consultant Respiratory Physician at the Trust.

Chris Chaney, Chief Executive of CW+ leading the COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund, explains how an existing Trust innovation project is helping; “Clinical Research Fellow, Miss Meera Joshi, has been leading the world’s largest cohort study evaluating this innovative wearable patch in our Trust as part of our CW Innovation programme. She can use the datasets from this original study to better understand the implications of changes to respiratory rate, temperature and heart rate in quarantined groups. We believe this is the first time sensors have been used outside of a hospital setting.”

The story was also covered by Digital Health

About the COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund
Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and their charity, CW+, have launched the COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund to help our staff provide the best possible care for these patients.

The COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund will support our hospitals in three key areas:
•    New Equipment – Including ventilators, blood gas machines and patient vital-sign monitors
•    New Technology – Including remote monitoring devices, digital consultation tools and mobile tablets
•    Support for Frontline Staff – Including the creation and establishment of Health and Wellbeing hubs at our hospitals to provide respite, information and refreshment for our teams; and the recruitment and deployment of a specialist volunteer workforce to support staff and patients on our wards and across our organisation

Please go to the CW+ website to donate: www.cwplus.org.uk/donate

CWPLUS Registered Charity No.1169897

About CW Innovation
The CW Innovation programme, led by Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and its charity CW+, aims to identify and deliver high-impact innovation initiatives and improvements that support the goal of delivering exceptional patient care and experience, and address some of the real-time challenges that healthcare organisations face today.

Together, the Trust and the charity have been working to develop a proactive and open environment for the introduction and evaluation of the latest clinical and digital innovations. By building on our existing portfolio of innovation projects and our growing reputation in this field – we are a Global Digital Exemplar and a founding partner of the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator – we are looking to significantly expand our programme of work as CW Innovation.

About Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust 
The Trust manages Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, West Middlesex Hospital and a number of community sexual health and HIV services across London. It employs over 6,000 staff who care for nearly one million people. The Trust provides a range of specialist clinical services as well as general hospital services for people living locally, which include A&E and maternity at both hospital sites:

• One of the top ranked and top performing hospital trusts in the UK
• One of the largest A&E providers in the UK, treating over 325,000 patients each year
• One of the largest providers of women and children’s care in the country, delivering over 10,000 babies every year
• Home to many specialist programmes including a Burns Service, which is the leading centre for London and the South East, and an internationally-recognised HIV and sexual health service which has been at the forefront of the global fight against HIV / AIDS for the past 30 years

About Sensium and the Surgical Company Group 

Sensium is part of the Surgical Company Group, a collection of 9 healthcare business with a shared goal of improving patient outcomes. The Group ventures include innovative med tech development with a global customer footprint and European distribution businesses. The group is headquartered out of Amersfoort NL.

Sensium is a UK med tech company based just outside Oxford where we employ a team of highly specialised and skilled engineers and scientists. Originally a spin out from Imperial college Sensium have been at the forefront of the research and development of remote patient monitoring and now have over 20 peer reviewed publications validating the Sensium® system.

The Sensium® system is a discreet, wearable, wireless system for monitoring vital signs of patients. Smart algorithms continuously process and analyse all patient data, generating targeted notifications of patient deterioration, efficiently bringing the nurse to the deteriorating patient.
Further Information can be found at:
www.sensium.co.uk
www.tsc-group.com/en