Wards & Admissions

The Wards & Admissions area of BridgeERP HMS is the inpatient engine of the hospital. It is where a patient stops being a passing visit and becomes an admitted bed-holder — tracked from a pre-admission booking, through the daily life of a ward, to a clean discharge. This overview explains how the inpatient model fits together: wards and the beds inside them, the live bed map nurses watch all shift, the admission record that follows the patient, and the nursing, acuity and dietary functions that surround the bed. Ward clerks, charge nurses, bed managers, admitting officers and matrons all work here.

What this area covers

Inpatient care in BridgeERP HMS is organised around three linked records. A ward (hms.ward) is a physical nursing unit — a general ward, a maternity unit, a paediatric ward. Each ward holds many beds (hms.bed), and each bed is the slot a patient physically occupies. The admission (hms.admission) is the clinical-and-financial record of one inpatient stay; it points at a ward and a bed and walks through a status from pre-admission to discharge. Around these sit nursing assessments, nurse-acuity scoring, therapeutic diets and bed housekeeping, so that a single admitted patient has one coherent inpatient chart.

The headline screen is the Bed Map, a colour-coded board of every bed grouped by ward. A glance tells the bed manager what is free, what is occupied, what is being cleaned and what is out of service — the same picture the admitting officer needs before sending the next patient up.

Where to find it

The inpatient workspace lives under the dedicated Wards & Admissions top menu:

• Wards & Admissions → Inpatient → Admissions — the admission records, split into Pre-Admission, Active, Discharged and All.
• Wards & Admissions → Inpatient → Bed Map — the live colour board, grouped by ward.
• Wards & Admissions → Inpatient → Wards — the list of wards with occupancy figures.
• Wards & Admissions → Inpatient → Beds — All Beds, the Cleaning Queue, the Cleaning Log and beds in Maintenance.
• Wards & Admissions → Inpatient → Transfers — the audit trail of bed-to-bed and ward-to-ward moves.
• Wards & Admissions → Inpatient → Occupancy, Length of Stay and 30-Day Readmissions — the management views over the same admission records.
• Wards & Admissions → Configuration → Settings and Wards & Admissions → Bed Features — the setup screens.

Critical-care, dietary and housekeeping functions are grouped under the parallel HMS Core → Wards & Admissions branch — see ICU & Critical Care and the dietary and bed-board entries below.

Before you start

Three pieces of master data must exist before you can admit anyone. Set them up in this order:

1. Create your wards under Wards & Admissions → Inpatient → Wards, choosing a ward type and naming the ward in charge.
2. Create beds inside each ward, giving each a bed label, code and number, and a bed class. See Wards, rooms & beds for the full bed setup.
3. Optionally define Bed Features (oxygen point, monitor, isolation) so beds can be matched to clinical need.

The admission lifecycle

Every inpatient stay is one admission record that moves through a fixed set of statuses. Understanding these states is the key to the whole area:

The buttons on the admission form move the record between these states — Admit Patient, Mark On Leave, Return from Leave, Transfer, Request Discharge and Discharge. The full workflow, including the care team and dietary side, is covered in Admit, transfer & discharge.

Ward types

Every ward carries a Ward Type that classifies the nursing unit and, by default, the class of the beds inside it. The available types are fixed:

Bed states at a glance

The colour of every tile on the Bed Map is driven by the bed’s State. There are seven states, and the bed manager reads the whole board by colour:

The full mechanics of how a bed moves between these states are on the beds page.

Nursing and the bedside

Once a patient is in a bed, the nursing layer takes over. Under HMS Core → Nursing → Nursing the ward team records vitals charts, intake/output (I/O) charts, nursing assessments and care plans, medication administration (the MAR), shift handovers and nursing incidents. The HMS Core → Nursing → Nurse Acuity branch scores how much nursing each patient needs and compares required against actual staffing per shift, raising Gap Alerts when a ward is under-staffed. These functions are what turn an occupied bed into a documented episode of care.

Housekeeping & turnover

A bed cannot simply be re-used the moment a patient leaves. When an admission is discharged, the bed drops to a Cleaning state and a cleaning task is raised. Housekeeping works the Cleaning Queue, marks the clean complete, and only then does the bed return to Available. The EVS Bed Board and the environmental-services tasks under HMS Core → Wards & Admissions manage this turnover and the deep-clean schedule. The mechanics are detailed on the beds page.

Reports & KPIs

The inpatient area produces the metrics hospital managers live by. The Occupancy view shows live bed utilisation; Length of Stay tracks average bed-nights; 30-Day Readmissions flags patients re-admitted inside the quality window; and Bed Turnover measures how fast beds are cleaned and returned. Each ward record also computes its own occupied, available and cleaning bed counts and an occupancy percentage.

Wards & Admissions menus at a glance

The whole inpatient menu tree, with the record each entry opens:

Roles & access

Inpatient records are scoped by facility and by security group. The groups that touch this area:

Related

• Wards, rooms & beds — the bed map, bed states and housekeeping.
• Admit, transfer & discharge — the ADT workflow and care team.
• ICU & Critical Care — critical-care beds and acuity.
• Emergency — where many admissions begin.