West-Com Novus
Ask SysNurse — West-Com Novus
Ask SysNurse — search the verified guides, fixes and answers for West-Com Novus, or ask the nurses who use it every shift.
About West-Com Novus
Nurse call system (Novus).
Part of Bedside & Patient Tech — call lights, monitors, pumps & interpreters.
SysNurse never stores your work password — signing in always happens on West-Com Novus’s own official page.
Tips, guides & fixes for West-Com Novus
Fix: West-Com Novus — a call will not clear
On Novus, a call that stays up at the console after you answer it is almost always still open at the room end: the patient station was never cancelled in the room, a call cord is partly unplugged, or a second device in the same room is holding a call of its own. Answering at the desk does not close it out — the room does.
- Go to the room and cancel the call at the patient station itself, then watch the corridor dome light go out.
- Reseat the call cord and the pillow speaker in their wall sockets until each one clicks — a cord resting on one pin keeps re-raising the call.
- Check the bathroom station and any bed-exit or secondary device in the room; a second active device keeps the room showing as calling.
- Look at the console again once the room is clear. If the call is still displayed with everything cancelled and reseated, treat it as a system fault: tell the charge nurse and put in the biomed or facilities work order the same shift.
- Until it is fixed, round on that room more often and tell the patient the plan — from the bed, a light that never clears looks exactly like being ignored.
Fix: West-Com Novus — the console display does not match the call
The Novus console works from a room map. When the map and the corridor lights disagree, trust the lights and the room, not the screen — a stale display or a room re-assignment that never got updated can point you at the wrong bed.
- Use the corridor dome light and the room number on the call itself to find the patient first. Care comes before the screen.
- Check whether the room or bed was re-assigned — a patient move that was not updated at the console leaves the old room on the map.
- If your login lets you refresh or re-open the console view, do that once. Do not restart shared equipment mid-shift unless your unit procedure says to.
- Report the mismatch to the charge nurse and through your facility route (biomed, facilities, or IT, per local practice) with the room, the time, and what the screen showed versus the light.
- Keep answering by dome light until it is sorted, and hand the fault over at shift change so the next nurse is not sent to the wrong room.
Fix: When the system is DOWN — downtime basics
Every system you rely on will have a down day. Downtime is a drill you already know: care continues on paper, times get written down, and recovery goes smoothly for the nurse who documented like it mattered — because it does.
- Confirm it is really down: check one other workstation or ask a neighbor, then notify your charge nurse — they own the downtime call.
- Switch to your facility’s downtime forms and downtime med records. Know where the paper lives before you need it; if you do not, ask now.
- Write times on everything: meds given, vitals, events. Recovery charting later lives or dies on those times.
- Call the IT help desk and note a ticket number if your facility uses them — and use the downtime viewer or read-only access if your facility provides one.
- When systems return, back-chart exactly what the paper says, marked as downtime entries per policy — never reconstruct from memory. Hand the paper to your charge nurse at recovery.
Fix: Workstation on wheels — will not wake
A dead WOW is usually a battery story: carts live hard lives, get unplugged by housekeeping, and quietly drain against the wall. Power first, panic never.
- Plug the cart into a wall outlet and give it two full minutes — a deeply drained cart often shows nothing at all until it sips some power.
- Check the basics: the monitor power button, the PC power button, and the cart’s own power switch or strip, which hides near the base.
- Hold the PC power button for ten seconds to force it fully off, wait ten more, then power on fresh.
- Swap to a working cart so your med pass and charting do not wait on one machine — borrow from a neighbor and trade back later.
- Tag the dead cart per your unit’s habit and tell your charge nurse; biomed or IT owns cart batteries, and an untagged dead cart just gets pushed to the next nurse.
Fix a problem on West-Com Novus
Pick what it is doing and follow the steps. Fixes here are guided, step by step — SysNurse cannot reach into your workstation, and no app should. Never type your work password anywhere except West-Com Novus’s own official sign-in, and never share patient information in a fix request.