Enabling Single Occupancy Care through Digital Innovation: Insights from the National Rehabilitation Centre.

As the NHS moves toward 100% single occupancy hospitals under the New Hospital Programme (NHP), the National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC) is demonstrating how digital design can reconcile privacy and safety with efficiency and human connection.

Through collaboration between Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and Ascom, the NRC offers a live testbed for digitally enabled rehabilitation. It redefines how patients, clinicians, and data interact within the single-room care environment.

Reframing the Single-Occupancy Challenge

The shift to single occupancy is redefining the clinical and operational dynamics of hospital design. Privacy, infection control, and family accommodation are long-recognised advantages. Yet single rooms also disrupt established models of teamwork and observation.

As Lisa Yates, Digital Strategy Lead at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, acknowledged, “clinicians can’t easily see or monitor patients when behind a closed door,” raising legitimate concerns around both safety and efficiency.

Traditional open wards naturally facilitate visual oversight and informal peer support. By contrast, single rooms risk creating both physical and psychological distance between caregivers and patients. The NRC has approached these tensions not as obstacles to be managed, but as design provocations that invite innovation in how digital tools can replicate or even enhance lost forms of connectivity.

Digital Systems Restoring Visibility and Connection

The NRC’s digital infrastructure has been deliberately conceived to reinstate visibility, awareness, and responsiveness within a dispersed clinical setting. At its centre sits the silent two-way nurse call system, which Yates described as “a core critical caring tool, but being delivered quite differently to how it traditionally is delivered across hospitals.”

By routing patient calls directly to staff iOS devices, the system eliminates ambient noise, enables two-way voice communication, and allows clinicians to triage and respond without unnecessary physical movement. The outcome is a calmer, acoustically softer ward environment that supports concentration, rest, and recovery.

Complementary technologies extend this ecosystem of awareness:

• AI sensors detect “intention to leave bed,” enabling early, preventative interventions before incidents occur.

• A Real-Time Location System (RTLS) safely monitors patient movement while maintaining freedom of rehabilitation.

• Bedside terminals integrate entertainment, digital therapies, and environmental control, providing both comfort and autonomy while lightening the routine workload on nursing staff.

Together, these components create what might be termed the digitally visible patient: a model in which safety, comfort, and communication are continuously supported through data-driven means, without compromising privacy or independence.

Embedding Technology through Clinical Partnership

A consistent thread across the NRC project has been the insistence that digital adoption must be clinically co-authored. Technology succeeds only when it reflects lived clinical experience.

“Staff are sometimes afraid that by using digital devices we’re taking away that staff-to-patient care,” observed Ascom Clinical Consultant Sophie Evans. “But actually it’s more so to enhance the care… so nurses can spend longer with the patients by the bedside rather than doing other things at a computer.”

This principle of co-design shaped every phase of deployment. A pilot at the Trust’s existing rehabilitation unit, Linden Lodge, allowed teams to trial technologies, refine configurations, and familiarise themselves ahead of transition. “They’re really excited about this piece of kit,” Yates noted, “because not only does it recognise certain behaviours, it can also form part of an overview of how that patient is actually rehabilitating.”

Such iterative engagement built not only competence but confidence, establishing technology as an extension of clinical intuition rather than a substitute for it.

Managing Information, Not Just Delivering It

Digitally dense environments can quickly overwhelm staff with a proliferation of alerts and data streams. The NRC’s approach has therefore been to curate information, not simply distribute it.

“It’s about making sure that we understand the workflows,” explained Ascom’s Mathew Wakelam. “Who needs to know about it, who needs to respond to it, but actually for who is it just noise?”

Dynamic assignment and escalation protocols ensure that only relevant staff receive notifications, reducing cognitive load and maintaining situational focus. Evans added that “there’s always like a third catch net… if everyone says they’re busy, for example, we can then send it to the coordinators.”

In effect, the NRC is shaping a new digital etiquette, one where information is filtered and purposeful, supporting attentiveness rather than fragmentation.

Future-Proof Infrastructure and Interoperability

Perhaps one of the most transferable lessons from the NRC concerns infrastructure. Digital enablement, the speakers stressed, must be conceived as an architectural prerequisite, not an afterthought.

“Everything needs data,” stated Benjamin White, Commercial Analyst at NUH. “Once you open a new building, you don’t really want somebody going in straight away and breaking through walls… Having that extra capacity for your network is really, really key.”

Equally vital is technological agility. “Whatever technology you pick, whatever platform you decide on… it’s going to change,” noted Wakelam. “Pick a platform that enables your solutions to grow, to scale.”

By prioritising open standards and modular systems, the NRC is building a digital estate capable of evolving alongside medical innovation and operational demand. It provides a foundation for longevity rather than obsolescence.

Toward the Digitally Connected Patient

The NRC’s digital model extends beyond the inpatient setting toward a broader ambition: the continuum of connected care. Data generated through AI sensors, monitoring devices, and therapeutic applications can inform personalised rehabilitation and predictive interventions both inside and beyond the hospital.

Yates emphasised, “We would want to enable patients to be able to continue… with their rehabilitation at home… and there’s going to be quite a focus and shift on preventative [care].”

Tim Painter mentioned that, to him, this represents the next evolution of hospital intelligence. “The more data points, the more information we have around our patients behind those closed doors, the better decisions we’re going to give our clinicians.”

Such integration of data and care processes could support the expansion of virtual wards and home-based recovery models, ensuring that the digital connection initiated in hospital persists across the wider care journey.

Key Insights

From the NRC case study, several principles emerge for organisations seeking to navigate the transition to single-room care environments:

• Engage clinicians early. Co-design underpins adoption and credibility.

• Design for human connection. Digital systems should enhance, not replace, interpersonal care.

• Manage information intelligently. Prioritise clarity over volume.

• Future-proof infrastructure. Invest in scalable, interoperable systems from the outset.

• Extend the digital continuum. Integrate hospital and home environments through shared data and tools.

As Tim Painter concluded, “These digital solutions are offering new ways of working and if we just throw it at the nurses, it’s not going to wash… It’s been able to engage early, realise how this technology is going to be used for the patient cohorts.”

A Blueprint for Future Care

The NRC demonstrates how carefully integrated technology can make single occupancy not only feasible but transformative. It enables privacy without isolation and efficiency without detachment.

More broadly, it signals a shift in healthcare design philosophy, one where digital architecture and clinical empathy converge to create environments that are quieter, smarter, and more attuned to the needs of both patients and professionals.

In that sense, the NRC stands not merely as a hospital but as a prototype for digitally mediated care. It illustrates how the physical and digital estates can serve a single, shared purpose: improving human recovery.

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