OK, well maybe not that Florence and definitely not since 1820, but Radius Care, a leading aged care provider, recently debuted its new self-check-in kiosk. The digital device is obviously named after the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. This new digital Florence offers unique advantages to nurses over the traditional aged care check-in experience.

The pandemic created overnight requirements for Radius Care to ensure that visitors and staff weren’t bringing in the virus. Nurses have always needed to health screen visitors entering an aged care facility, but previously a paper questionnaire was needed to assess if the visitor met the check-in safety requirements. Then the pandemic heaped more time and administration on an already time consuming and administratively heavy task.

“The requirements of the pandemic took nurses further from away from their real jobs. Essentially, there was a full-time nurse checking people in – it was a necessary, but poor, use of limited nursing resources. They had to ask about close contacts, locations of interest, and they had to do it again if the person came the next day. Florence now automates the tasks, she even does temperature checks,” says Corrie Bronkhorst, RN and Quality Manager at Radius Care.

Corrie helped inform the design of the system so it could help nurses get back to caring for people. It was her job to ensure the new system integrated the new thermal scanning and contact tracing requirements that came with Alert Level 3 last year.

Corrie’s input led to what Florence is today, a system to streamline and automate entry processes. The unit lets users create a profile, maps contacts, locations of interest, and family members, handles sign in and sign out, asks the necessary health questions, and does a temperature check. If an alert is triggered, the visitor will be denied entry and a call will go to an appropriate person to handle the conversation, instead of a nurse. The system logs all the data and give users a QR code to scan for easy access to the facility, and Florence is soon to integrate vaccine passports too.

Corrie says the nurses’ experience with the kiosk has been overwhelmingly positive.

“Florence saves our nurses a lot of admin time. They’re really happy getting back to the floor so they can look after our residents. You become a nurse to look after people who aren’t able to look after themselves, and Florence has allowed our nurses be nurses again,” says Corrie.