What a privilege to be at TELHACK this weekend. I didn’t know what to expect but it certainly wasn’t that! At 5.30pm, after working pretty much non-stop all weekend, the teams did an amazing job of pitching to the judges.
The judges posed some valid but difficult questions and they were handled brilliantly. Everyone managed to stick within their time limit of 4 minutes and apart from a couple of technical hitches, all ran smoothly.
The winners were Top Banana. They developed a way for being able to assess, score and provide feedback for suturing skills (practising on a banana).Their idea sounded fairly straight forward and the final presentation was polished and very professional looking. This doesn’t mean it was easy though. The programming, refining the images, setting the limits, angles and lengths for the scoring system and putting it all together looked extremely complicated and one of the team joked that “sleep is overrated” as she topped up her coffee after getting no sleep at all!! Dedication! But it paid off… They were named winners for their fantastic idea 💡and got to take this home… 
The ECHO team were placed 2nd with their idea of using Bluetooth to orientate and induct new staff to a ward or environment. We’ll done guys!!
I really admire all the participants that have taken part and the way they have pulled together and developed raw ideas into real solutions for healthcare education problems.
I’m on the train back to Plymouth now, have tweeted my final post for NHSTelHack’s twitter and logged out. I look forward to telling my nursing colleagues about the weekend and the fantastic ideas! Technology Enhanced healthcare is exciting… Thank you for having me!
Natalie