BlackBerry solutions mean that healthcare professionals can stay securely connected to colleagues and operational data wherever their work takes them.

In addition to e-mail, calendar, contacts, instant messaging and web browsing, BlackBerry smartphones can be used with an increasing number of applications that have been designed with health and social care in mind.

These, in turn, are helping health and social care staff to improve decision making, reduce administration time, improve efficiency and deliver more flexible, patient-focused services.

For example, Hampshire Community Healthcare is putting mobile technologies at the heart of a move to join up local IT systems and improve access to vital patient data.

The Northern Doctors Urgent Care out-of-hours service is using an application developed by Astute Mobile Data Solutions to give its on-call doctors access to patient records; improving the service they offer to patients while making significant savings on administration.

And Glasgow City Council is giving its care workers access to information about their patients and their needs via BlackBerry smartphones. This is not only improving the service they offer, but reducing hospital discharge times.

To find out more, or to request a BlackBerry health solutions guide, please email: publicsector@rim.com