Emergency Department Coordination
ED crowding is a symptom of poor downstream coordination. Patients wait not because there are no beds, but because no one can see the whole picture. CAREFUL gives the ED real-time visibility and structured referral pathways.
The problem
The ED refers patients to the medical take, to specialties, to SDEC. Each referral is a phone call or a bleep — interruptive, untrackable and invisible to the rest of the team. The flow coordinator knows something was referred but not whether it was accepted. The patient waits.
How CAREFUL solves it
Digital referrals from ED to the medical take and specialty teams replace phone calls and bleeps. Each referral is a structured record: visible to both sending and receiving teams, with accept/reject status, a conversation thread and push notifications.
Flow coordinators see every referral and its current status on a single dashboard. Patients waiting for review are visible. Bottlenecks are obvious. Escalation happens before harm, not after.
Results
At Withybush Hospital, moving ED referrals to CAREFUL contributed to a 50% reduction in patients waiting in ED within four weeks. Referral time dropped from 22.5 minutes to under 1 minute.
Read the Withybush evidence → · Referrals QIP →
What changes for ED staff
Less time on the phone. Less time chasing. Referrals sent in under a minute from a smartphone. Confirmation that the referral was received and accepted — without a callback.