Two Way Radios - communication breakthrough

Communication in nurseries has always been a problematic area; practitioners are confined to their respective rooms providing care for their group of children.  On the face of it, this isn’t a bad thing, each room able to operate without the distraction of another room or activity. However, Little Beehive team members still need to communicate as freely as possible.  Over the years nurseries have implemented different ideas and methods, some have room intercoms, others internal phone systems and of course, standing by the room door to shout through to another room… not ideal!

However, Little beehive nursery have recently rolled out to all settings, what we believe to be the answer to nursery communication. We needed something that allowed practitioners to continue to practice on the floor, was easy to use and had minimum impact on their working day. Two-way radios were the answer!

You may have seen these before, in hotels, bars, building sites (or any industry really!) where the person in question will have a small earpiece in; super simple, but highly effective!

A four-month trial took place at our Newport nursery where, after a consultation with a care inspector and the team, we implemented 5 radios, one for the manager, one for each room senior, and one for the floating cover.

The radios are lightweight durable devices intended for the hospitality trade, and come with a “push to talk” microphone (meaning you are only heard when you activate the microphone and start to talk) and an “over-ear” ear piece designed for hospitality use, their “over ear” design is intended to allow the wearer to maintain full awareness and have no hearing loss while wearing it.

The radios allow for the team member to be in constant communication with other rooms at all time, even when they are engaged with a child in an activity, they are not being dragged away to answer a phone or intercom, they can have a full conversation while continuously engaging with the children of the nursery.

Another benefit that the improved communication brings is incident/accident response time, no matter where you are in the nursery, you will always have 4 other senior level colleagues ready to listen at the push of a button, and this doesn’t stop inside the nursery, the radios have a 5km maximum range and the team can continue to be in communication while on walks or trips.

Privacy was, of course, a concern to care inspectorate and to us.  Unencrypted radios can be listened to anyone who knows your frequency, however, Little Beehive nursery, working with Scotia radios, set up private networks for each of our settings.

A massive thank you to Scotia Radio who have helped us through the process, we will never go back to not using them; I don’t think we could take them off the team if we tried!