Measuring nursing movements using real time tracking data at the Royal Wolverhampton Hospital Trust

Real time location systems (RTLS) are increasingly used in healthcare with applications that include contract tracing and staffing. However, their potential to provide organizational insights requires staff compliance with the system. Our goal is to assess how many nurses are using the RTLS correctly (i.e. complying to the system). We collect RTLS data on the movements of nurses at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust. We identify the number of RTLS active nurses and compare it to what expected from the nurses’ rotas. We find that a significant number of nurses appear not to be active from the RTLS data. For approximately 15% of the active users, RTLS records below 10 movements per day. Nevertheless, most of the active users have daily RTLS times consistent with the average shift length. Applications of RTLS data may need to account for imperfect compliance of staff to the system.